Children Conceptualizing their Capabilities: Results of a Survey Conducted during the First Children's World Congress on Child Labour*

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a research project that allowed children to define their capabilities as the basis of a bottom-up strategy for understanding the relevant dimensions of children's well-being. The subjects of this research were children participating in the 'Children's World Congress on Child Labour' held in Florence in May 2004, organized by the Global March against Child Labour and other associations. Children were invited to interact and express their opinions on the most relevant issues related to their childhood and adolescence. The paper has three main aims. The first is to propose and legitimate a view that considers children not simply as recipients of freedoms, but also as participants in the process of delineating a set of core capabilities. The second is to propose a methodological approach to the conceptualization of a list of relevant capabilities. The third is to identify a tentative list of relevant capabilities for children through a participatory bottom-up approach. One of the key findings of the research is that, among the capabilities conceptualized, education, love and care are primary in terms of relevance.

Using the capability approach to analyze contemporary environmental governance challenges in coastal Brazil

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Lessons from the ‘new’ sociology of childhood: how might listening to children improve the planning of education for development?

“…It maintains that children should go to school in order to become educated and healthy workers, albeit to benefit themselves and their households rather than their national economies (Hanushek and Wöβmann 2007;Robeyns 2006). More radically, the work of Amartya Sen and others in relation to 'human capabilities' identifies human beings as 'the ends of economic activity rather than merely its means', and defines development in terms of what people are able and free to be and do (Biggeri et al 2006: 63, see also UNDP, 1990). This approach moves beyond the narrow instrumentalism of the human capital approach firstly in declaring that children should go to school because being knowledgeable and having access to education are intrinsically valuable universal or 'basic' capabilities in themselves (Biggeri, 2007: 197;Robeyns, 2006: 78;Sen, 1992: 4), and secondly in citing the ability to get a job as just one of the many valued capabilities that schooling has the potential to expand.…”

A Study on Child Labour as a Form of Child Abuse in Malaysia

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