Developing New Understanding of the Concept of Family Capabilities: Emerging Themes and Innovations from Family Research in South Africa.

This paper reports on ongoing work to develop new knowledge of Family Capabilities – a development of the Capabilities Approach (CA) based on the writing of Sen (1999, 2004, 2009) and Nussbaum (2011) – rather than resilience as a framework for understanding how families address challenges and improve their wellbeing.

South African policies explicitly recognise families as a central institution for socialisation; a source of emotional, material, and instrumental support; which is shaped by and shapes society. Significantly, policy promotes the concept of family capabilities, yet the concept is not defined and is open to interpretation. For us, family capabilities, the examples of choices made by families and the freedom to achieve those choices, are developed from the everyday experiences and doings of people in families, so that their priority, sequencing, and value arise from family social realities that in turn explicate differences within and between families. We are utilising multi-modal creative methods to co-design new understanding of family capabilities with two communities, one rural and one urban, in the Western Cape Province. Our objectives include development of a framework for interventions and research based on what families ‘do’ (Morgan, 2011).

At the time of writing, we have begun to analyse data from pilot fieldwork and will present our initial findings and conceptualisation for discussion. The work is supported through South African National Research Foundation funded research at the University of the Western Cape and a Leverhulme International Research Fellowship.

Morgan, D.H.J. (2011). Rethinking Family Practices. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sen, A. (2009). The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sen, A. (2004). Capabilities, Lists, and Public Reason: Continuing the Conversation. Feminist Economics, 10, no. 3: 77-80. DOI:10.1080/1354570042000315163

Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.