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The political economy of disability and development
Harriss-White, Barbara
Harriss-White, Barbara
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DP73.pdf
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"If measured by resources committed and by rhetoric, by the quality of analysis and by data availability, alleviating the condition of being disabled is the lowest priority on state welfare agendas in practically all developing countries,1 arguably in all countries. The 1993 Human Development Report contains compendious data on all aspects of the human condition, with the exception of disability on which there is nothing at all (UNDP, 1993). Influential typologies of vulnerability ignore the disabled (e.g. Cornia et al., 1987). On the social welfare agenda of India, poverty, caste and gender push disability to the foot. This low priority can be explained in public choice theoretic terms by the political weakness of disabled persons and by the high perceived economic costs and low perceived political benefits (or the high political opportunity costs and low economic benefits) of a state response to problems which are administratively anomalous and transactions-costly. It is logical to expect that such a calculus would operate more powerfully on the welfare agendas of poor countries than of rich ones. Intellectual neglect accompanies political neglect. Disability signifies that which a person suffering impairment cannot be and cannot do. Sen has not developed his powerful concept of capability — what people can be or do — for the incapabilities that follow from impairment (Sen, 1990). His notion of development as capability expansion involves the exercise of positive freedom and residualizes negative freedom.2 But for certain disabled people, certain types of capability expansion are simply not possible.3 For most disabled people to experience, let alone expand, positive freedom, both the capability to function and the negative freedom of non-disabled people have to be constrained. A reduction in the negative freedom of others is a logical precondition to the achievement by poor disabled people of equality in the list of otherwise “basic capabilities” which are denied to the entire set of poor by their condition of poverty."(pg 7)
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1996-03
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With permission of the license/copyright holder