I like Sen’s explanation that the theme of freedom runs through our thinking on development, as both ends and means. Sen thereby provides us with a guide to our thinking; our approach is no longer a collection of statistics or piecemeal privileges, but a focused expansion of all freedoms which Sen argues captures all of the goals of development. As a response, Wright, Enloe, Kevane and Gray, and Youngs challenge Sen with situations wherein freedoms are in conflict, i.e. a just market does not exist:
Women’s land rights in Burkina Faso are highly specific, complex, and changeful, and they vary with time, gender, ethnicity, class, geography, and lineage. The State’s efforts to boost women’s development have sometimes been counterproductive because the policies did not take into account all these nuanced factors governing women’s land rights. Here, a de jure focus on economic freedom was problematic. While policies may have worked towards political freedoms and economic facilities (see p 10), they did not focus on the social unfreedoms that produced these disadvantages and which govern the rights most powerfully; in other words policymakers did not live up to Sen’s plea to pay attention to “the empirical linkages that tie the distinct types of freedom together” (10).
We can use the importance of this unity of freedoms to address the other essays. Louisiana’s clean air, water, and soil belong to the commons and can’t be captured by a market, it is true, but this economic reality is by far not what’s most salient here. Rather, it is the (social, political, economic) unfreedoms that have produced a racialized and classed pattern of great disadvantages. Similarly, poor women in Southeast Asia are part of a market—but also suffer from a more important pattern of discrimination. I have a little more trouble integrating Youngs into this thesis, but I can interpret it as an illumination of social unfreedoms that persist with the rise of dramatic, potentially freeing information technology.
[note – my understanding of Sen changed while writing this, so that the essay became a stronger answer to the others. This is why my tone and certain claims may be inconsistent from first paragraph to last.]
