Terry McKinley
The standard injunction for sustainability is that the present generation should bequeath to the next generation as much total productive wealth (including physical, natural, human, and social capital) as it inherited. But this begs the question of whether the present inheritance of productive wealth is adequate to sustain human development--now or in the future. It is conceivable, for example, that in the name of equity the current generation should pass on to the future generation a larger stock of total assets if the latter generation is expected to confront more adverse circumstances, such as widespread drought or epidemics.
This consideration underlines the point that sustainability is a fundamentally normative concept: it implies maintaining the achievement by each generation of a certain generally acceptable level of basic human development. As Anand and Sen have eloquently stated it, 'what needs to be conserved are the opportunities of future generations to lead worthwhile lives' (Anand and Sen 1994).
The relevant question becomes, what would be the minimally acceptable resource requirements for leading a 'worthwhile life'? This is what the present generation should be encouraged to pass on to future generations. The focus, in other words, is not a particular stock of productive wealth, but a particular level of human development. What most fittingly defines this level of human development is the absence of deprivation. This threshold defines society's obligation to each of its members: to provide them with at least the minimal enabling means to pursue their own development as human beings, free of want and deprivation. Hence, poverty eradication is an integral feature of achieving sustainability.
Normative sustainability cannot be adequately evaluated in monetary terms. It involves setting explicit non-monetary targets, thresholds or standards. Some have suggested that the non-decline of the Human Development Index should be taken as a measure of normative sustainability, much in the same way that the non-decline of total productive wealth should be taken as a measure of technical sustainability (Bartelmus, 1994). But most of the variables in the HDI reflect the average condition of a given population and may not therefore show that a significant proportion of this population does not have the minimal means necessary to lead decent human lives.
While similar to the HDI, the Capability Poverty Measure, which was developed in the 1996 Human Development Report, is better designed to monitor human deprivation. Human development is defined by the expansion of capabilities, deprivation by the lack of basic or essential capabilities. Capabilities are ends: they are not reflected in inputs, such as income, but in human outcomes in terms of the quality of people's lives. The CPM differs from the Hill in focusing on people's lack of capabilities rather than on their average level of capabilities, and in avoiding the confusion between ends and means by not using income as an indicator of human development. As its name suggests, the CPM focuses on 'capability poverty', not on 'income poverty'. Because the term 'poverty' is so closely identified with lack of income, the CPM should more properly be called a Human Deprivation Index.
The CPM is a simple composite index that takes the unweighted arithmetic average of three indicators: the percentage of children under five who are under- weight, the percentage of women aged 15 years and older who are illiterate, and the percentage of births unattended by trained health personnel. These three variables cover considerable ground: indications of health and nutrition for the population as a whole (underweight children), access to reproductive health services and a test of people's access to health services in general (unattended births), and basic educational attainment plus information on gender inequality (female adult illiteracy). As an illustration, the following table contains the CPM for ten countries and the percentages for each of the index's three components:
Chile ranks at the top in terms of having reduced capability poverty to a minimum. The average of the percentages of its population deprived in the three different dimensions is 2.8%. Bangladesh ranks at the bottom, with almost 77% of its population deprived, on average, in all three dimensions. Capability poverty is much more severe in South Asia than income poverty. As the CPMs for such countries as Botswana and Indonesia indicate, even rapidly-growing countries could do much better in reducing human deprivation. These results shows that the CPM is a very simple, but powerful, tool for highlighting human deprivation.
Other variations on a human deprivation index are possible. The way variables are added together, for example, could allow for less trade-off between deprivation in different dimensions than is inherent in an arithmetic average. Variables could also be combined to monitor both fairly stable stock conditions of human development (such as stunting of children or adult illiteracy) and conditions that can change significantly in the short run (such as wasting of children or net primary enrolment ratios).
If data were available, a composite index of the following six indicators would be preferable to the CPM: 1) education: adult illiteracy and percentage of children aged 6-11 not enrolled in primary school, 2) health and nutrition: percentages of children who are stunted and who are wasted, and 3) reproduction: percentages of babies who have low birth-weight and expectant mothers who are anaemic.
What is important is that variables be chosen that directly reflect, as much as possible, the lack of basic human capabilities. In the case of the CPM, these capabilities are 1) living a healthy, well-nourished life, 2) being literate and knowledgeable, and 3) having the capability of safe and healthy reproduction. The focus should be on the quality of people's lives, how they are able to act and to function.
In some cases, it is not possible to find adequate indicators that directly reflect capability shortfalls. As substitutes, indicators of access may have to be used, such as access to potable water and to adequate sanitation. Access to medical services could also be used or, more concretely, rates of immunization or use of oral rehydration therapy. In the CPM, the availability of trained health personnel to attend births is an access indicator. It is used as proxy for the capability of safe and healthy reproduction. If the indicator of low birth-weight babies was more reliable, it would have been used instead.
The distinguishing feature of the Capability Poverty Measure is that it is a 'people-centred' index of deprivation. It tries to define poverty in terms of lack of basic capabilities. It does not focus on lack of access to services, facilities, assets and commodities, which was more characteristic of the Basic Needs approach. It also does not emphasize lack of access to an indirect means to human well-being, such as income, which represents the conventional method of gauging poverty.
NOTES
1 The author developed the Capability Poverty Measure while a staff member of the Human Development Report Office. He is currently working in the Social Development and Poverty Elimination Division of UNDP, New York. The views expressed here are his own.
REFERENCES
Anand, Sudhir and Sen, Amartya (1994) Sustainable Human Development: Concepts and Priorities. Occasional Paper #8, Human Development Report Office, UNDP, New York.
Bartelmus, Peter (1994) Measuring Sustainability in Growth and Development. Mimeo, UNSTAT, New York.