Sustainable development and Sen’s capabilities approach

At the Rio+20 conference the world community renewed its "commitment to sustainable development and to ensuring … [a] sustainable future for our planet and for present and future generations [1]." The conference stressed the need “to mainstream sustainable de-velopment at all Ievels ... to achieve sustainable development in all its dimensions [1]." The global demand for sustainable development Ieads to a question posed by Amarty Sen: Who has to be sustained [2]? And then answered by him: "lt is not so much that humanity is trying to sustain the natural world but rather that humanity is trying to sustain itself [3]." Sen places the focus of sustainable development on the individual and his or her welfare in a more and more restricted world. Against this background, he proposes a new definition of sustainable development "as development that prompts the capabilities of present people without compromising capabilities of future generations [3].” We are now looking for a method to reveal the capabilities and functionings of German society based on the methods set up by Mahbub ul Haq in the conceptual framework of the human development report and its Human Development Index (HDI) [4]. In our model, like ul Haq and Sen, we focus our analysis not on the goods that people pro-duce and consume, but on the life that people live or would like to live with these goods. The life they are capable of living is determined by their own set of functionings, which vary sig-nificantly between household and income groups. To this end, we developed the German Development Index based on the methodology of the Human Development Index, but, in contrast to the HDI, we did not restrict our analysis to average values for one country. We determine the German Development Index for the whole of society and for its social groups and income groups. Therefore we use the German household database (Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichprobe (EVS) [5]) to analyse five household groups (all households, single households, single parents, couples without children, couples with children) and nine income classes. With our analysis we intend to reveal the functionings of German society and its households in a new integrated assessment approach and operationalize Amartya Sen’s sustainable development definition