Capabilities, Housing, and Basic Justice: An Approach to Policy Evaluation

In this response article, I welcome the development of the capabilities approach as a normative evaluative approach to policy. This development provides a useful and interesting contribution to how we think about housing, particularly with regard to normative engagement with housing issues. Highlighting some of the issues with a housing-related use of the capabilities approach by the author, I suggest that the theory of justice created by John Rawls can be used to assist in further exploring how to use capabilities as a way of analysing housing policy. Here, Rawls’ metric should not be dismissed as fitting solely within the resource-focused evaluative approach to policy, but as one which can also contribute to the development of a normative evaluative approach.