A/HRC/5/3 page 8 13. The capability approach was formulated by Amartya Sen in his books “Commodities and Capabilities”,6 and “Inequality Re-examined”7 as an alternative to the traditional income approach. The capability approach to social welfare is based on the idea that “living may be seen as consistent of a set of interrelated ‘functionings’ consisting of ‘beings and doings’, such as being adequately nourished, avoiding premature mortality or simply being happy, as examples of functionings”. A person’s set of being is understood as a vector of functioning. In choosing what kind of life to live, a person chooses among such vectors. The set of such feasible vectors for any person is that person’s capability set; a capability set represents a person’s opportunities to achieve well-being. One may also say that it represents a person’s freedom.8 It is important to note that Sen’s “Notion of Functioning” is derived, yet quite distinct from commodities. It is not just having food but the way that food is used and accessed that can determine the function of being adequately nourished. However, freedom is not identified within the set of feasible vectors of functioning, i.e., the capability set. There is no doubt that Sen’s approach has opened up a wide vista for analysing the conditions of the well-being of the poor and also of poverty. Sen’s “Notion of Capability as Freedom” brings it close to the human rights approach that makes selected freedoms a socially accepted human rights entitlement. In that sense, the proposition that poverty is the deprivation of basic capabilities is perfectly justified and links in quite a straightforward manner to the deprivation of certain basic freedoms which have now been accepted as human rights such as the right to food, the right to health, the right to education and the right to an adequate standard of living. This approach is perfectly consistent with the approach adopted by the Independent Expert on Extreme Poverty. 14. However, the problem with the capability approach lies in putting it into operation. Robeyns (2000) notes that despite the fact that Sen published “Commodities and Capabilities” as early as 1985, the number of empirical applications has been quite limited, mainly because it is hard to estimate and value functionings.9 15. Some differences arose in the Workshop regarding the inclusion of the notion of social exclusion in the definition of poverty. One European expert argued that adding social exclusion to the definition of extreme poverty, which has many different dimensions, might make it very difficult to estimate, since 90 per cent of any population can be regarded as excluded in one sense or another, especially if one included exclusion from the labour market, exclusion from basic services and social relations; moreover, there is currently no methodology to operationalize the concept on the basis of available statistics. This view was opposed by others who considered 6 A. Sen, Commodities and Capabilities, North Holland, 1985. 7 A. Sen, Inequality Re-examined, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 8 See, Robert Suqden, Welfare Resources and Capabilities - The Journal of Economic Literature, December 1993. 9 See Ingrid Robeyns (2000), “An unworkable idea or a promising alternative? Sen’s capability approach re-examined”, p. 26.