Habitability as capability: proposing a normative definition of the concept – D. O’Byrne | Cyberseminar on the Habitability concept

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Marion Borderon

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Mar 14, 2023, 10:32:17 AM3/14/23
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Dear PERN community,

In continuation of the discussion on the definition of the concept of habitability started yesterday with the sharing of the work initiated by David Wrathall (Oregon State University), we share with you today the statement of David O'Byrne (Lund University, Sweden): "Habitability as a capacity: a proposing normative definition of the concept".

David Wrathall et al. end their essay by writing "Habitability is a choice". David O'Byrne says: "Habitability is a freedom" and should be understood in terms of the freedoms available to the inhabitants of a given area. David proposes to define habitability along the lines of Amartya Sen's approach, which defines freedom in terms of capabilities.

There could be places "where it is barely possible for people to access basic capabilities, such as being fed with food and water and having shelter, to places that are much more livable, where freedoms such as education, belonging to a community and access to safe spaces for recreation, for example, are available".

Thinking of habitability in terms of capability reflects the intrinsic normativity of the concept. We can only agree with David that 'habitability is something we want to see maintained and improved' and that, therefore, discussing habitability involves considering inequality in capabilities, power relations and political processes.

This normative view of habitability provides an excellent perspective on the link between habitability and migration, and David explains at the outset of his essay that a simple inverse relationship between habitability and migration does not seem to stand up to the evidence.

This point complements a point in yesterday's first statement by David Wrathall who argued that migration is a signal of changing habitability. If I interpret David O’Byrne's essay correctly, one could be argued that what might be a signal of habitability change is an increase or decrease in forced migration and involuntary immobility.

Please have a look at this excellent statement and let us know your thoughts, comments or questions!

Yours sincerely,

Marion

CyberseminarExpertPaper_DOB_Habitability_as_capability.pdf

Harald Sterly

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Mar 15, 2023, 5:50:21 AM3/15/23
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Dear David, thanks a lot for your input - and congratulations to this innovative and inspiring approach!
In my view, the conceptualization of habitability as Sen's (and Nussbaum's) capabilities allows for a fine grained perspective on habitability. And it is very open to discourses and concepts of rights-based approaches. This which would enable some big steps forward towards bridging the science-policy gap (at least I would hope that).
One issue that would be interesting is how to operationalize (and justify) the hierarchization of capabilities. As I understand Sen/Nussbaum, (s)he does not favour one over other(s), rather emphasizes the interdependence (much like Max-Neef with his Fundamental Needs and Satisfiers). One question is here, in my regard, in how far an "objective" perspective  (e.g. allowing to compare the habitability of different places and to justify priorization of assistance) should be stived for, over a subjective, locally defined perspective (e.g. allowing to reflect the actual needs and priorities of a local community or its sub-groups). Both are important, and methodologically, I think it should not be too difficult to cover them also both. This could be done e.g. in assessing the local priorities of the different needs / capabilities through participatory methods - and later aggregating and comparing the assessments of different communities / groups.
Looking very much forward to further discussing this!
Best,
Harald

Shashikant Kumar

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Mar 15, 2023, 7:16:24 AM3/15/23
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Dear All
Thanks for the wonderful discussion on habitability. The need to differentiate human habitats with ecological systems is merely an effort to understand the adaptability or impacts of extreme events. Forced migration or induced by hazards does not take well in uninhability of the places, since its perceived differently across the regions. I may add that, the impacts of the climate induced changes in human habitations would be driven by the compulsions due to lack of social capital and incomes. The poverty and locational inability like in atolls islands would not allow people to think about mobility or migration thus the adaptability. The human race has been mobility due to very fact of habitability issues, yet they have adapted the way life through ecosystem approaches. The question remains, Is inhabitation a cyclic process or replacement from one human group to another? The scenario is a warning to the human race on the face of extinction, however the immense adaptive capacity cannot be negated. The physical destruction may lead to more vulnerability than challenges to resilience communities that would develop in drought -flood prone regions. The loss of life is a concern, when it's sudden or quick enough for many social groups and mobility is social decisions. Somewhere we have been trying to take the political route in new global alliances. 

Thank and regards

Shashikant Kumar


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Oliver Ujah

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Mar 15, 2023, 7:31:03 AM3/15/23
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Dear Marion,

I wish to bring in some aspects of local reality as we brainstorm on the conceptual definition of habitability. I think that habitability could have many dimensions including environmental habitability, structural habitability, economic habitability, socio-political habitability, etc. I think that a holistic conceptualization of habitability should recognize and take these dimensions into account. 

Cheers,

Oliver.

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Maria Franco Gavonel

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Mar 15, 2023, 1:53:27 PM3/15/23
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Dear David,

Many thanks for this great input. 

I think that conceptualising habitability as a freedom gives more elasticity to the term and, as Oliver mentions, allows to account not only for hostile conditions in natural environments, but also in social and economic ones. The example that comes to mind is what Anne Case and Angus Deaton call the 'deaths of despair' to characterise the increase in suicides and death from addictions among working class families. This is a very different type of attrition than climate migration, but I believe it illustrates well how some environments can become uninhabitable for particular segments of the population when basic freedoms are curtailed and there are no future prospects for overcoming this situation. 

Maria

David O'byrne

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Mar 16, 2023, 4:44:25 AM3/16/23
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Hi Harald,

Thanks for these questions and comments.

 

I am less familiar with Nussbaum’s work than Sen’s, though I am aware of some differences. I believe she does see a certain group of capabilities as being universally valuable and more important, but as you say she does not choose a hierarchy between them.

 

Sen in principle leaves it up to the people who are affected by, and therefore participating in, the decision to determine for themselves which capabilities they will prioritise in their chosen course of action. I did not develop much on it in the above piece, but his idea of social choice is that through discussion and deliberation people will produce an evaluative framework constituted by a weighted list of evaluative factors (which are related to different capabilities). They then use this list to assess different courses of action. As such the approach is not really meant to define something abstractly, like habitability, but to select between alternative courses of action, in which, of course, an implicit idea of habitability will be entailed. So I agree, I think, that it could be a good link between concept and practical decision-making.

 

This is a really interesting point that you raise about comparability and international assistance. So, while the form of decision-making I describe above is the deepest form of social choice that Sen advocates, this is something that is very difficult to achieve in practice. Not only is it costly and involved, as Sen acknowledges, but accepting the decisions that emerge from such radically democratic procedures will likely require redistribution of resources from private capital to the less well-off in society (something Sen acknowledges sometimes but does not incorporate to his theory). For whichever of these reasons, Sen himself saw the need for a much quicker and more objective/universal way of assessing capability to direct investment. This is why he was so instrumental in the formulation of the Human Development Index and in advocating for it with the World Bank.

 

But I think it is probably necessary to go beyond Sen on this point. He has focused very much on metrics and measures of development. And I think with capability he provides us with very good, even the best, metrics. But he has paid less attention to institutional and structural conditions that would allow these metrics to become the basis of decision-making. Perhaps when we are thinking about prioritising assistance we should think not just in terms of indicators and metrics of development/habitability, but what kinds of institutional and structural barriers exist to habitability/development/well-being etc. Where are they most severe, where can they be most fruitfully tackled, where do we have greatest chance of success, and so on?


All the best,

David

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David O'byrne

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Mar 16, 2023, 4:47:23 AM3/16/23
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Hi Oliver,

 

I agree with you whole heartedly. And I think that the capability approach can provide a good framework for conceptualising these different types of habitability in a common language. But more than a common language it provides a common point of reference for people. They can relate all these qualitatively very different types of habitability to their own well-being and freedom. At the same time, it avoids making all of these different factors in an individual’s well-being equivalent, i.e., reducing them to monetary values.  


David

David O'byrne

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Mar 16, 2023, 4:49:40 AM3/16/23
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Hi Maria,

 

Thanks for your comment. You raise a very good point and a good example of it. Indeed, I think you also point to one of the difficulties with conceptualizing habitability. On the one hand, for the reasons I point out in the piece I think it is wrong to associate habitability only with migration, but then, on the other hand, when opening up that definition to include all the things that affect whether people find it desirable to live in place, the number of factors and phenomena that we start to include becomes almost endless. If habitability becomes such a comprehensive term, then what distinguishes it from well-being, adaptation, development, etc. In short, I wonder how we keep habitability as a focused and discrete terms at the same time as we avoid it just being an inverse concept for migration. Perhaps a question that we need to answer at the same time as define a new concept is what added value/new insights does this concept bring?


 

David

 

Från: 'Maria Franco Gavonel' via PERNSeminars - List <pernse...@ciesin.columbia.edu>
Skickat: den 15 mars 2023 18:53
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Kopia: Oliver Ujah <olive...@gmail.com>; PERNSeminars - List <pernse...@ciesin.columbia.edu>; Marion Borderon <marion....@gmail.com>
Ämne: Re: [PERN Cyberseminar] Habitability as capability: proposing a normative definition of the concept – D. O’Byrne | Cyberseminar on the Habitability concept

 

Dear David,

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