Indigenous Peoples, Human Development and the Capability Approach

Both indigenous peoples and the capability approach (CA) take a holistic view on development and stress the multiple dimension of development as the expansion of people's well-being including social, cultural and spiritual elements. The paper investigates to what extent the capability approach can be applied to the analysis of indigenous peoples' sustainable human development. First, the paper will discuss the aspects in which the two perspectives coincide. It will be argued that Sen's approach to not define a specific list of ‘basic capabilities' but in fact to leave this open to be defined dependent on local context and people's priorities makes the capability approach especially suitable to the evaluation of indigenous peoples'. Second, the paper will discuss the issue of how indigenous peoples - through a participatory process- define their own ‘list' of capabilities and set priorities for their own human development. The research will present a list of human and social capabilities which was generated through an extensive consultative process with indigenous communities in Peru and Bolivia and which reflects the communities own definition of well-being and human development. Based on these empirical results, the paper will highlight that while the CA provides an effective framework to analyze the individual well-being of people, it has important limitations in evaluating the collective well-being of groups, such as indigenous communities. Finally, the paper will introduce the concept of “instrumental” and “substantive” social capabilities and will demonstrate that there exist certain social capabilities which do not only have an instrumental value for enhancing the human capabilities of individuals, but in fact have a substantive character on their own. It will be shown that this emphasis on social capabilities is particularly relevant to indigenous peoples, since based on their strong collective identity and worldview, they define their-well-being in collective and not only in individual terms