The Capability Approach through the lenses of German development NGOs - A case study of NGOs in the German development cooperation sector

Sammanfattning: The Capability Approach (CA) has been increasingly gaining popularity amongst scholars and policy-makers, offering an alternative to the so far predominant position of the GDP as the primary measure of human development. The CA is a normative framework which can be used as a basis to conceptualize and evaluate socio-economic and political phenomena such as inequality and human well-being. One of the core strengths of the CA is its focus on the individual’s capabilities and well-being while taking into consideration the surrounding socio-economic context. While a growing number of papers are being published, using the CA as a conceptual framework to assess human well-being and evaluate and critique socio-economic policies, there remains little to no mentioning of the CA in reports of German development organizations on the CA. With a focus on NGOs in the German development cooperation system, this thesis thus assesses (i) how widely known and applied the CA and the underlying idea of ‘development as freedom’ are amongst a small sample of NGOs in German development cooperation and (ii) how development experts working in these NGOs assess on the one hand the challenges to implementing the CA into the working processes of their respective NGOs and on the other hand the CA’s potential to become an alternative framework to guide the conceptualization and evaluation of development projects. The findings of this study show that the CA is hardly known amongst this study’s respondents and while some features of the CA appear to be reflected in the NGOs’ guiding principles and working processes, they cannot with full certainty be traced back to the CA. The identified challenges and obstacles to an implementation of the CA in the German development cooperation system include amongst others the lack of communication between academia/research and development practice, the respondents’ perception that the CA is too abstract for reality, and a number of issues such as inflexible hierarchical structures, complex bureaucracy and lack of time and staff capacities etc. which can be traced back to organizational structures within the German development cooperation system. The thesis concludes with a call to raise further awareness of the CA amongst development practitioners and to strengthen the exchange between development scholars and practitioners to join forces in searching for ways of how to best operationalize the CA.