Since the mid-eighties, social policies have increasingly being turned into re-commodification tools, i. e. their main objective is no more to compensate for income loss, but to promote quick and possibly long-lasting reintegration into the labour market. This evolution has coincided with the emergence of various activation requirements imposed on recipients, upon which entitlement to benefits are often made conditional (esp. in unemployment insurance and social assistance programmes). In this context, activation is frequently identified with compliance with the expectations defined by officers of the public administration. Thereby, it is claimed that activation can take place without, or even against, the beneficiaries’ consent. In other words, the prevailing view of activation or empowerment is implemented in a top-down way, and this applies especially to the most disadvantaged beneficiaries, who are also those submitted to the strongest requirements or sanctions.
By contrast, the capability approach (henceforward CA) insists that genuine empowerment cannot be achieved if the empowered, i. e. the activated person is not willingly participating to the process.
Developed by Amartya Sen, the CA relies on the distinction between functionings, i. e. what a person actually is or does, and capabilities, i. e. what a person could be or could do. In this framework, the enhancement of individual capabilities requires both empowerment (i. e. being adequately equipped in terms of capacity to act) and free participation: if the former is missing, the individual recipient’s freedom remains formal (in the Marxian sense); if the latter is not guaranteed, then empowerment boils down to paternalism.
Author(s): Jean-Michel Bovin, Maël Dif-Pradalier
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