A Senian approach to the relationship between the natural environment and the distribution of welfare: a new perspective on inequality measurement and choice

Abstract

The thesis presents an integration of Sen’s capability approach as a welfare assessment framework with the domain of the natural environment. The purpose of this is to develop a conceptual framework for analysing and empirically measuring people’s ability to exercise choice over valuable welfare outcomes (their ‘beings’ and ‘doings’) with respect to the environment. In this way, Sen’s capability approach offers an alternative approach to evaluating environmental value based on the metric of freedom, expressed in terms of the metrics of capabilities and functionings. Underlying the purpose of the thesis is the premise that the particular approach taken to inequality measurement and individual choice analysis is significant to how the distribution of the welfare dimension of the natural environment is evaluated. The thesis provides a new perspective on inequality measurement by assessing individual genuine opportunity in this context. The measurement framework for environmental capabilities broadens the informational assessment space of individual genuine choice by considering aspects of both welfare and agency opportunity. Thus, the measurement constructs of environmental capabilities and functionings aim to provide a welfare assessment tool to inform economic decision-making processes in a richer and more distributionally-sensitive manner. Operationalising the conceptual measurement framework, the thesis undertakes a quantitative study of relative inequality across environmental capabilities between individuals with different personal characteristics. By comparing factor scores and conversion rates, which are estimates of how well different individuals are able to achieve certain economic welfare outcomes, the study presents a broader approach to assessing the distribution of individual welfare, based on a metric of genuine opportunity, with respect to the natural environment. The thesis makes three contributions: (i) it sets out a framework for economic welfare evaluation in the context of the natural environment based on a synthesis and further development of the capability approach, and in a way that can be implemented empirically; (ii) it demonstrates how this can be applied using an existing dataset, using an expanded informational base to generate economic welfare insights; (iii) integrating the natural sphere into the CA, it demonstrates the scope for analysing individual choice and relative inequalities between individuals and sub-groups of the population.