In 1986, Martha Nussbaum took up a position as a research adviser at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki – a post which she occupied for eight years, working one month every summer (she was concurrently a full-time professor at Brown University). It was during these years that her work began to focus on feminism (see previous chapter) and on international development. Nussbaum's most influential contribution was to bring philosophy to questions which had previously been primarily regarded as economic. As she puts it in her acknowledgements to her 2000 book, Women and Human Development : Aristotle's insistence on the ethical importance of a vivid perception of concrete circumstances had its own contribution to make, I felt, to a field that is frequently so preoccupied with formal modelling and abstract theorizing that it fails to come to grips with the daily reality of people's lives. (Nussbaum 2000: xv) The Influence of Amartya Sen It was while she was working at WIDER, too, that she met Amartya Sen, the economist and philosopher, with whom she had a relationship for several years (she and her husband, Alan Nussbaum, divorced in 1987). Sen was an important intellectual influence on Nussbaum and she credits his work for being ‘a source of insight and inspiration, especially the way it combines a passion for justice with a love of reason’ (Nussbaum 2000: xvi). Together she and Sen worked on and popularised the capabilities approach, a highly influential approach in both development economics and political philosophy. Put simply, the capabilities approach is the outcome of three propositions:

• All human beings have the right to flourish.

• Human flourishing can be broadly defined in universal terms.

• It is the task of governments to provide citizens with capabilities to flourish.

Nussbaum made many important and distinctive contributions to the theory, but it was Sen who pioneered it. In 1979 he published a paper, ‘Equality of What?’, in which he argues that merely allocating resources equally does not guarantee that all individuals will possess the same capabilities. For example, allocating equal resources to a disabled person and to an able-bodied person results in in equality.