Putting Appadurai's “Capacity to Aspire” and Sen's Capability Approach into Dialogue

In his seminal paper, Appadurai (2004) introduced the concept of “capacity to aspire” as a cultural capacity that may open routes out of poverty for the poor. He envisions entering a robust dialogue between his conception and the capability approach. The notion of aspirations is attractive for capability scholars since it seems to answer some shortcomings of the capability approach, namely the lack of any theory of preference or value formation, the missing dynamics, the question of countering adaptive preferences and eliciting information on people’s values. I analyse capability literature on aspirations and argue that although they relate to these shortcomings, they fail to eliminate them and to enter the dialogue Appadurai invited. For doing this, the collective nature of the capacity to aspire has to be recognised. I suggest that the capacity to aspire rather than remedying one of the above-mentioned shortcomings is best understood as an example of Sen’s concept of agency and how poor people can build up, exercise and sustain agency.