The Capability Approach and Evaluation of Community-Driven Development Programs

Community-driven development (CDD)—a development paradigm that upholds community participation and empowerment—has become an integral part of the World Bank’s operational strategy in the last few decades. It claims to bring better development results in terms of poverty reduction, good governance, effectiveness, sustainability and inclusive development. However, despite its claims and popularity, actual evidence of the development impacts of CDD has been mixed. One reason for the mixed results can be attributed to the incompatibility between the top-down evaluation methods used and CDD’s principles and processes. This paper argues that the Capability Approach (CA) pioneered by Sen and Nussbaum can be used as an evaluation framework to more effectively evaluate CDD programs. The CA is compatible with CDD’s principles of valuing agency and empowerment; it offers a broad informational base for normative judgement; and it is sensitive to gender and individual differences. This paper will also address challenges in operationalizing the CA to evaluate CDD programs in particular and development projects in general and will apply the proposed operationalization principles to develop a list of capabilities suitable for measuring poverty reduction, a key objective of CDD interventions, thus showing that the operationalization of the CA is possible.