What is a Capability-enhancing Social Policy? Individual Autonomy, Democratic Citizenship and the Insufficiency of the Employment-focused Paradigm

Since the mid-1990s, global social policy discourse and practice has shifted from a focus on social protection and redistribution towards the promotion of people’s labour market participation and human capital enhancement. The capability approach significantly contributed to legitimize these developments. The aim of this paper is to criticize this dominant interpretation of the capability approach in social policy, which reduces people’s capability to their capacity to participate in the economy. An alternative conceptualization of capability-enhancing social policy is then proposed. At the individual level, social policy should increase the number and variety of valuable options open to individuals. On the one hand, this means supporting—alongside employment—also care work and political participation. On the other hand, since the benefits of employment cannot be taken for granted, this requires also reforming the workplace in order to expand citizens’ agency and wellbeing. At the collective level, social policy should establish the social preconditions for an effective and substantive democracy, providing the social bases of political equality through a focus on redistribution and equal respect. This alternative conceptualization has also implications for education policy: rather than people’s human capital, education should enhance individual and collective autonomy.