Why expanding capabilities does not necessarily imply reducing injustice: an assessment of Amartya Sen’s Idea of Justice in the context of Mexico’s Oportunidades/Prospera

The idea that discussions about justice ought to offer practical political guidance has gained force in recent years. In this context, Sen's Idea of Justice (2009) aims at fulfilling this role. I assess to what extent Sen's comparative approach to justice succeeds in providing a useful conceptual framework to reduce injustice in practice, as it claims. Using the context of poverty in Mexico, and the social programme Oportunidades/Prospera as illustration, I argue that Sen's approach remains insufficient to guide injustice-reduction actions effectively. First, I note that despite enhancing individual's capabilities, these social improvements have not translated into a more just social reality overall. Second, I associate these shortcomings to the failure of capability-enhancing policies in accounting for the relational reproduction of injustice. Therefore, I conclude that to reduce injustice, we need to broaden the scope of injustice-reduction policies to address the ways in which injustice is reproduced through social interactions.


Introduction
In its recent history, Mexico has been characterised by a continuous search for policies towards greater development and social justice (Obregón, 2013). Since the early 1980s, the government shifted from import-substitution to marketliberalisation policies, which involved a strong fiscal contraction, economic deregulation, trade and financial liberalisation, and privatisation (Cárdenas, 2009). At the time, the view of decision-makers like Pedro Aspe (1993), Mexican Finance Minister from 1982to 1994, was that modernisation through a liberal market was the best way not only to promote economic development and opportunities but also to fight poverty and achieve a more just society. Yet, the outcomes of this strategy are placed into question by the persistent levels of poverty and social inequalities of the country. In this paper, I consider that aside from political, historical, economic and other external circumstances, this failure can also illuminate theoretical debates about justice (Sales, 2003), particularly, about the role of normative theories in guiding political action effectively.
In this regard, 'ideal' theories of distributive justice, which aim at defining what a perfectly just society is, have come under severe criticism for their inability to offer adequate guidance to confront unjust situations (e.g. Stemplowska & Swift, 2012;Valentini, 2011Valentini, , 2012Hamlin & Stemplowska, 2012). Knowing what justice entails ideally does not say anything about what to do today to improve the condition of those who suffer many kinds of injustice (for example, the children not able to afford three meals a day in one of the largest economies in the world today, or the indigenous people who are mistreated even if any form of discrimination is forbidden by law). This is why we also need a practical theoretical framework able to guide injustice-reduction interventions. This is precisely what Sen's Idea of Justice (2009) aims to do, to offer an alternative framework to think about justice practically.
Since its publication, Sen's approach has prompted rich theoretical debates about the methodology of theories of justice (e.g. Biondo, 2010;Boldyrev & Herrmann-Pillath, 2013;Freeman, 2012;Jensen et al., 2010;Simmons, 2010;Robeyns, 2008a). Few, however, have actually paid attention to the propositions advanced in Sen's Idea of Justice from a more practical perspective. In this regard, Sen argues that a comparative framework which ranks states of affairs on the basis of capability information is better suited to account for justice improvements and to think about justice-enhancing change in an imperfect world. One way to judge the relevance of Sen's comparative framework in practice would be by checking its 'implications' in a 'particular case in which the results of employing [it] can be seen in a rather stark way, and then to examine these implications against our intuition' (Sen, 1980, p. 197;emphasis in original). In this paper, I aim to do this.
I examine to what extent Sen's idea of justice offers an adequate framework to inform policy interventions to reduce injustice effectively, in the light of the context of poverty in Mexico and, in particular, its main anti-poverty strategy to combat it, Oportunidades (recently renamed Prospera). 1 My aim is not to evaluate the justness of Mexico's overall social and institutional arrangements nor Oportunidades itself, but the expediency of Sen's emphasis on expanding capability as judging criteria for reducing injustice. For this purpose, as I explain below (Section 3), I use Oportunidades as illustration not because the normative justification of the social programme is based on Sen's approach but because it will serve as a revealing example to argue that his theoretical framework is incomplete in dealing with injustice appropriately. First, I show that, by dealing with cases of injustice in isolation from the wider social context in which they take place, it may classify any positive expansion in capabilities as justice enhancing even if it may not be in accordance with our intuitions of what a minimal improvement in justice implies. Second, I will argue that by using capabilities as a main policy evaluation space, it fails to account for the relational reproduction of injustice effectively, leaving it out of the scope of policy action. Thus, by scrutinising Sen's framework in the light of the Mexican Oportunidades case, I aim at shedding light about how the practical task of reducing injustice could be bettered in general. To the extent that the following analysis is illuminating, it would apply equally to social ailments other than poverty or in the context of other social policies.
The paper is structured as follows. Firstly, the next section introduces Sen's approach to justice and it offers a brief rationale for using the case of study of poverty in Mexico and its social programme, Oportunidades, to examine it. Secondly, the paper justifies the use of this Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programme as a revealing illustration of Sen's Idea of Justice in practice. Thirdly, by relying on different social and economic information, the paper highlights the potential limitation of Sen's framework to account for and to transform the unjust context in which people's lives develop. Finally, it explores why despite Oportunidades success in enhancing people's capabilities, Sen's approach remains insufficient to reduce injustice in the sense of breaking down the reproduction of injustice through social interaction.

Sen's comparative approach to justice
In The Idea of Justice (2009; here after IJ) -whose arguments appeared in condensed form in Sen (2006) -, Sen defends that a comparative approach to justice is more adequate for thinking about questions of justice and making societies more just. To do so, first, he presents an elaborated rejection of 'ideal' theories of justice, what he refers to as 'transcendental' theories, of which Rawls's Theory of Justice (1971) is the main reference. Second, he formulates an alternative framework to think about justice practically, namely, a comparative approach concerned with ranking social arrangements as more, or less, just than another.
Briefly, Sen argues that a real-world theory of justice should throw light at how justice can be advanced. For this purpose of examining and rectifying injustice, he insist, we do not need to know what a perfectly just arrangement is, e.g. we can still agree that children not being able to eat three meals a day are injustices that can and should be remedied. Instead, what matters is how to make these situations more just even if they remain short from perfection; a task for which transcendental theories are not well equipped and are not even helpful (Sen, 2006). The problem with these theories is that they do not inform us about how to compare between two sub-optimal states of affairs as more or less just (IJ, pp. 10-17), nor do they provide a useful framework on how to advance justice. For both of these ends, Sen argues that what we need is a framework to make 'comparisons between feasible possibilities' (IJ, p. 62) and rank different sub-optimal societal arrangements as more or less just. Two core aspects guide these comparative assessments: reasoning and freedoms (Deneulin, 2011).
Whereas the ranking about possible courses of action should be based on public reasoning, this ranking must be made according to the kind of lives that people can actually lead rather than with how institutions are organised (IJ,6,69,(82)(83). 2 That is, consistent with his previous work, Sen advocates for using people's capabilities to be and do (Sen, 1980(Sen, , 1985 as the ultimate criteria to judge social situations as more, or less, just than another. For example, a situation in which people enjoy greater real opportunities to be educated (or participate in community life, be healthy, or be free from malnourishment, etc.) is more just than another in which they do so to a lesser degree. In sum, Sen's comparative method involves: (1) a shared recognition of an unjust situation even if for different reasons, (2) wide and inclusive public discussion to rank different courses of action, and (3) this ranking should be in terms of their impact on expanding people's capabilities.
To illustrate, let us suppose that all consider as an injustice that needs to be remedied the fact that indigenous children in Mexico are falling behind non-indigenous children in education. According to Sen, this shared agreement would be sufficient to motivate action via public discussion. For instance, one could ask whether having bilingual schools in Spanish and indigenous language is more just than unilingual education in some indigenous communities. The rank between these options would depend on what children are able to do and be in either of these two arrangements. So, as long as there is a partial agreement that bilingual education opens up higher education or employment opportunities, then this course of action would be more just (and injustice would be reduced).
In this way, in contrast to previous work on the metric of capabilities, which Sen presents solely as a space of evaluation of states of affairs, in the IJ, he presents a 'comparative method' useful to (1) assess the justness of states of affairs and (2) to orient political action to promote justice. Yet, leaving aside the theoretical controversies of Sen's approach, one central aspect of his IJ, the translation of its normative demands into practice, demands further scrutiny. Indeed, despite his insistence in practical remedies to reduce injustice, there is actually very little guidance in Sen's own writing about how to translate adequately his comparative framework into practice. A large gap remains between IJ's normative framework and its transition into specific unjust social realities.
Of course, specific policy recommendations will depend on the issue at hand, local values and interpretations, people's agency, power relations, feasibility concerns, causal analysis and so on (Alkire, 2008;Hill, 2007). However, as recognised by Wolff (1998) theoretical reflection about justice 'is not completed by finding the fairest principles of justice' (p. 102) or sound normative ideals such as Sen's. We still need to think about questions of implementation, which are of primary importance for development practitioners (or any actor) looking for normative guidance about how to promote more just societies in practice. Thus, in order to assess its expediency, we need to reflect about the kind of policy guidance that Sen's framework can offer to rectify injustices in a specific social context. This would imply investigating, even if in a general way questions such as: (a) what kind of actual practices can emerge from Sen's comparative framework? (b) Which of these actions echo IJ's normative values and intentions? (c) What does it mean to expand a capability to enhance justice? What its normative scope for action should be? (d) What actions promote inclusive public discussion and how can we know? (e) What counts as justice-enhancing change? (f) When can we say that a certain action or a set of actions has expanded someone's freedom? (g) What kind of change is needed to say that justice has been effectively advanced? These and other related questions are prior to, and assist in, the actual implementation of a specific policy on the ground. Yet, these questions are mostly absent in Sen's writings and related literature. As such, there is an open space for critical inquiry about implementation that lies in the space between the justification of normative ideas and the actual practical matters that fall into the context-dependent box. In the reminder of this paper, although I do not offer a complete response, I try to shed light to some of these questions by scrutinising Sen' IJ in a real context of injustice, namely, poverty in Mexico. In particular, I offer some insights regarding (a), (c), (e), and (g).
Any real-world approach to justice must pay attention to poverty. Regardless of how it is defined, experiencing poverty can be associated to deprivations that range from lack of income to inadequate levels of consumption, nutrition, education, health, access to drinkable water and other necessities of life, a shorter lifespan, and other vulnerabilities such as potential mistreatment, lack of self-respect, and so on. In other words, poverty is one of the greatest sources of people's unfreedom (Sen, 1985cited by Wolff et al., 2015. Thus, even if for different reasons, most theories of justice would condemn people's experience of poverty as unjust , especially since a great deal of it can be explained by factors outside people's control (Cosgrove & Curtis, 2017). As I show below, this is certainly the case in Mexico. Poverty remains an unmet social debt since Mexico's Independence despite its growing social commitment to fight it through its CCT Oportunidades. A social programme that, as I discuss below, resonates with what a likely application of how Sen's IJ could look in practice.
Therefore, in addition to contending that it provides an illuminating example of Sen's IJ in practice, there are three reasons why I explore the case of Mexico to probe Sen's framework to address injustice in the real world. First, widespread poverty is utterly entrenched in people's sense of injustice and the urge to combat it has been part of people's demands throughout its recent history. In fact, Mexico's aspirations to liberal ideals and social justice are enshrined in the three legal constitutions of the country (1824,1857,1917) -though these commitments have been conceptualised, evaluated, and pursued differently in different times (Riesco, 2007). Second, the long history of inequality and poverty that characterises the country offers an empirical background to discussing questions of injustice. Third, despite different understandings of justice throughout the country's modern history, Mexico's political context has reached a partial consensus to ensure the provision of some form of protection for the worst-off of society in its social programme Oportunidades. This programme has been praised internationally and has served as a model for other CCTs in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Hence, analysing this policy in the context of social justice debates can be equally illuminating for other social realities as well.

Oportunidades and Sen's Idea of justice
Mexico's anti-poverty programmes initiated in 1988 under the name of PRONA-SOL, which was later replaced by PROGRESA in 1997. Since then, PROGRESA already contained the main tenets of today's anti-poverty programmes but it covered mainly rural localities in extreme poverty, though its coverage grew fast. In 2002, its coverage expanded reaching 4.2 million families in both rural and in urban areas, and consequently its name changed to Oportunidades (Cárdenas, 2009). Finally, in 2015, the programme changed its name to PROSPERA. This change also included some further developments in terms of expanding education, promoting employment, and access to financial services. However, as mentioned before, in this paper I use the name of Oportunidades to reflect the fact that most data comes from this time.
As Oportunidades, the social programme was already one of the largest and most successful CCTs in the world, reaching 6.1 million families in 2015 (Levy, 2006). In general, Oportunidades aims at breaking the vicious cycle of the intergenerational transmission of poverty by providing a cash transfer to poor families in return of people's compliance with certain behaviours in relation to health, education and nutrition. In this sense, it follows the so-called system of co-responsibility in which 'poor families directly [participate] in overcoming their difficult circumstances' (Levy, 2006, p. 12). This poverty reduction policy has been widely celebrated and supported by international organisationsincluding the World Bank and the IMF (UNDP, 2011). This is partly because it is more effective than earlier programmes in ensuring that poor families invest in previously neglected areas that are key to improve children's chances to exit poverty (through better education, health and nutrition). The programme also grants families the flexibility to decide how to spend the income transfer they receive (instead of receiving specific in-kind benefits).
In close resemblance to capability language, Oportunidades has sometimes been described as a programme which is about 'expanding the capabilities of nutrition, health, and education of people . . . in order to contribute to their quality of life as well as increasing their productive capacity' while it conceives persons as 'agents of their own development . . . [who can] overcome poverty through their own efforts' (SEDESOL, 2015 3 ; see also Levy, 1991). Similarly, it defines poverty in terms of 'the deprivation of basic capabilities rather than merely as lowness of incomes' (Sen, 1999, p. 87). As the deputy minister of finance from 1994 to 2000, Santiago Levy, puts it, the extreme poor are those who are . . . undernourished [who] are more vulnerable to disease, are at risk of developing anthropometric deficiencies, are at times lethargic and, in general, are less able to lead a healthy life with sufficient energy to satisfactorily perform tasks in the labour market and/or participate in educational activities. (Levy, 1991, p. 7) Of course, description in such terms does not imply that Sen's conceptual framework provides the normative foundations of Oportunidades. As some scholars recognise, Oportunidades seems to follow a pure economic logic more closely related to the notion of 'human capital' than to human capability (Dallorso, 2013;Flores-Crespo & Mendoza, 2007). Similarly, whereas some features of the programme may contribute to beneficiaries' sense of agency, its agency aspect is problematic in many respects (see Garza-Vázquez & Ramírez, 2018 and references cited there), particularly its gender and conditionality component (Boltvinik et al., 2019;Molyneux, 2006;Ochman, 2016). Thus, here I am not suggesting that Oportunidades is indeed the quintessential embodiment of Sen's approach in practice.
Rather, despite these pertinent caveats, relating this social programme to Sen's IJ is possible by making the sensible assumption that, as a normative framework, the main practical implications of Sen's approach is to redirect justice-advancing actions towards enhancing people's capabilities and their agency. To the extent that this assumption is acceptable as a general rule, then, one can make the case that Oportunidades does offer an illustration of Sen's IJ in practice -even if an imperfect one. 4 It does identify the worst-off of society in terms of capability deprivation and it aims at improving key capabilities, which are central for social justice (e.g. Venkatapuram, 2011). Consequently, to the extent that Oportunidades is successful in expanding people's opportunities in the above-mentioned dimensions, these outcomes could be in line with Sen's notion of advancing justice in practice.
In addition, Oportunidades has the added value of promoting public discussion. Indeed, one of the constant features of the programme is the 'public reasoning' it has generated via openly frequent evaluations by internal and external bodies alike; for example, by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) (e.g. Skoufias, 2005;Skoufias & McClafferty, 2001) and many other studies (e.g. Adato & Roopnaraine, 2010;Agudo, 2010;Debowicz & Golan, 2013). Oportunidades is therefore considered one of the most studied social programmes in the world. All these studies (using different methodologies, different samples, and different time spans) have served the purpose of improving the design, scope, quality and effectiveness of the programme implementation. As such, they stimulate public discussion on the programme, which in turn have translated into specific recommendations about how to reduce poverty.
At this point, at least two objections could be raised. One could point out, correctly, that Sen's notion of public reasoning should go beyond the programme's evaluation to include also beneficiaries' voices. Actually, Oportunidades does provide some mechanisms for the programme participants to express their suggestions and complaints. No doubt, these are still not good enough. Better still would be for beneficiaries to actively participate at all stages of the programme, including in its design. Certainly, this would be ideal. However, in an imperfect world, could we not say that society is better off with this kind of transparent open discussion via programme evaluations than without -even if it remains short from perfection -to paraphrase Sen? Note that I am not denying here that there is much room for improvement in this aspect of the programme, as in many others, and we should not refrain from pointing it out (see Boltvinik et al., 2019 for a comprehensive critique). The point is, while we cannot really know what the programme would look like had it followed Sen's IJ perfectly, it still offers a useful illustration of Sen's ideas put into practice in an imperfect world and thus the arguments that flow from the analysis below should remain illuminating.
A second objection could argue that this interpretation of Sen's IJ is simplistic and does not do justice to the subtleties and complexities of Sen's argument. In both the IJ and in his latest book, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, Sen recognises that it would be misleading to assess justice only in terms of capabilities since we should also take into account the fairness of processes and agencies involved in each situation (2017, p. 358;IJ, pp. 295-298). Indeed, Sen's strong emphasis on processes could usefully direct our attention to the institutional web and to other social values that should come into the comparative exercise via public reasoning. However, it is not clear what this would imply in real-world practice. One way forward would be to suggest focusing on institutional change and on promoting public discussion as matters of justice. Yet, Sen would insist -as he does -that the quality of these institutions should be assessed from the perspective of individual freedoms (Sen, 1999;IJ). It is in this sense that, for Sen, justice improvement must necessarily be connected to individuals' actual lives. As such, in practice, both people's opportunities to do and be (capability aspect) and the relevance of the processes involved (agency aspect) can be interpreted in terms of capability expansion. 5 Notably, most studies have shown the positive impact of Oportunidades on the lives of its beneficiaries in many of its objectives (income/consumption, education, health and nutrition). For instance, in the health domain, it has increased health-clinic visits and regular check-ups, lowered the incidence of diseases in adults, children and newborn, improved reproductive health and reduced the incidence of mortality of mothers and children. In the education domain, it has increased school enrolment for boys and girls in both urban and rural populations in junior high school and high school. In the nutrition and consumption domain, it has boosted food intake, increased their height and weight, and reduced the proportion of malnourishment and obesity among children (e.g. see also Cruz et al., 2006;UNDP, 2011).
Therefore, looking at these functionings achievements, and accepting that at least some of these could indeed be considered capability improvements, one can conclude that Oportunidades has improved people's real opportunities to live well, in so far as more years of education, less illness and less malnutrition are considered as measures of capability expansion. 6 As such, from a pure comparative analysis à la Sen, one could also conclude that Mexico has become a more just society (more people enjoy greater opportunities to be educated, healthy, and so on, than before), even if it is far from being a perfectly just society and even if poverty still remains. In this way, anti-poverty policies in Mexico could seem to vindicate the comparative method Sen proposes: (1) There is a shared agreement (even if for different reasons) about the unacceptability of the precarious situation in which millions of people, especially children, live and the need to rectify it. In the reminder of this paper, nonetheless, I shall argue that this kind of guidance in line with the Senian framework needs further revisions; and that it requires going further than offering a mere comparative approach based on increasing capability as the ultimate measure to evaluate whether situations are more or less unjust.

Assessing Sen's IJ in the context of Mexico
As mentioned, Sen's idea of justice advocates for moving away from a 'totalist' approach to justice (IJ, p. 103) since, he argues, we do not need to directly assess the political and social arrangement as a whole in order to make judgments about specific cases of injustices. For instance, to put another example, the fact that women have now more equal opportunities for political participation is an advancement of justice even if sexism remains (Mexico has for example a large proportion of women as elected representatives even if women's economic participation remains low and gender-based violence remains widespread). My first concern is whether questions of development and justice can treat each partial situation as independent from others in a 'piecemeal fashion' (Simmons, 2010, p. 22) -as Sen implies.
In this respect, several authors claim that adopting a purely comparative framework may be sometimes counterproductive overall. This is because some actions might seem comparatively better than others in the short run (and in a one by one case) but might imply foregoing the possibility of a greater improvement in the future (e.g. Stemplowska & Swift, 2012;Gilabert, 2012;Thomas, 2014). This entails that we must evaluate positive (or negative) isolated social changes within the wider context in which they take place. In other words, social improvements have to be considered within the wider social achievements of the society as a whole. Otherwise, the claim that a policy is 'advancing justice' could be akin to a shallow claim stating that we are 'advancing knowledge' simply because more children have better access to passively acquiring more information through the web. Of course, facilitating access to information via internet is a positive change, but simply having more of it does not necessarily render a society more knowledgeable (one also needs to understand and critically analyse this information). Likewise, having positive social achievements may not be sufficient to construct a more just reality. Thus, to probe the argument of comparative justice proposed by Sen's IJ, we need to situate and assess Oportunidades' positive results in terms of capability-poverty reduction within the specific context in which they take place.
In Mexico, this policy context is that of a neoliberal understanding of development and justice (Aspe, 1993;Lustig, 2010), which places the goal of economic growth as the ultimate measure of success, and whose concern for the most vulnerable of society is a mere strategy for legitimising the economic and political system (Bayón, 2009;Riesco, 2007). In such context, poverty reduction policies serve the dual purpose of providing, on the one hand, a safety net for people who cannot secure the basic requirements for living, and on the other hand, a sort of a perverse 'safety net' to avoid structural social change and for the economic and political elite not to lose its privileges. As Boltvinik et al. (2019) suggest, in this situation, cash transfers to the poor act more like 'periodic handouts (with many demands) than as a [real] measure to get [people] out of poverty' (p. 186; my translation).
Indeed, looking at historical trends we can see that poverty in Mexico, in both multidimensional and income-based measures, remains entrenched. Table 1 presents data for the 'patrimony line of poverty' from 1989 to 2014. Although an income-based measure of poverty, it takes into consideration non-income dimensions such as health, education, clothing, housing and transportation. In 2014 (last available data), 53.2% of the population were living in poverty which is virtually equal to the average of the whole data from 1989 to 2014 (53.17%). In Figure 1, we can see that the trend is fairly constant since 1989, aside from the peak of 1994 to 1998, which reflects the impact of the financial crisis of 1994. Although there was a small period of improvement (from 2002 to 2006), which is usually associated to the massive expansion of the social programme Oportunidades, this reduction in poverty levels was not sustained and returned to its considerably high average level ever since. These rather disappointing results took place in a context in which social expenditure increased from 6.1% of the GDP in 1990 to 12.5% in 2008 (Cárdenas, 2009), and a budget increase of 126% in poverty reduction between 2006 and 2012 (OECD, 2015a).  Most recent data, however, can be obtained from multidimensional measures of poverty. Since 2008, Mexico adopted a methodology to assess poverty multidimensionally. This multidimensional measure includes information about income and access to six social rights (access to education, health, social security, home quality and spaces of the dwelling, access to basic services in the household, and nutrition) (CONEVAL, 2010). As Table 2 reveals, Mexico does not fare that well in this measure either. Although official data shows some significant improvements in the last years -both multidimensional poverty (41.9%) and extreme multidimensional poverty (7.4) are lower in 2018 in comparison to all previous years -, a more nuanced reading of these numbers shows a more fragile reality.
Leaving aside the fact that poverty levels remain extremely high (above 40%), looking at figures of each of its components (income and rights) in isolation exposes a more concerning scenario. In relation to right-deprivation, in 2018, 71.2% (89.1 million) of the population was deprived in at least one of the rights and 18.8% (23.5 million) in at least three rights, both deploying higher levels than in 2016. In relation to income-deprivation, 48.8% (61.1million) of the population does not earn enough to afford the minimum levels of nutrition, health and education and 16.8% (21 million) cannot even afford minimum levels of nutrition. In this case, the former does show signs of continuous improvement, whereas the latter shows only a minimal advance with respect to 2016. Yet, what summarises Mexico's poor performance in reducing poverty is the staggering fact that only 21.9% of the population (27.6 million out of 126 million approximately) is neither income-deprived nor rightdeprived (i.e. non-poor and non-vulnerable). That means that 78.1% of the population experiences some kind of deprivation. A figure that is also worse than in 2016. This reading thus provides some ground for concern as poverty does seem to remain deep-rooted. However, the crux of the matter here is not about the right way to read these poverty trends. Rather, what is really at stake here is: even if one accepts that poverty in Mexico has been actually reduced in the last years -without a doubt -and functionings/capabilities enhanced (as suggested by the data above), could we associate this poverty reduction to a more just state of affairs?
An assessment of Mexico from a broader and long-run perspective reveals that the country's social arrangement, and more than twenty years of Oportunidades as main strategy to tackle poverty and inequality, has not been successful in providing better opportunities for its citizens to live well on an equal footing. Indeed, several studies demonstrate that, while the market-oriented strategy of last decades has been somehow successful in ensuring macroeconomic stability, it has failed in achieving the country's historical demand for social justice (Obregón, 2013). Findings include stagnant levels of income and productivity, loss of purchasing power, persistent levels of poverty and income and social inequalities, low levels of social mobility, among many (Ibarra & Ros, 2019;Levy, 2018;Velázquez Leyer, 2018;Veléz Grajales & Monroy-Gómez-Franco, 2017; see also Lustig, 2010). Due to these poor social and economic results, this period of about 30 years is sometimes referred to as 'stabilising stagnation' (Esquivel, 2010, p. 37).
In the appendix, I present some statistics that confirm and complement some of these findings. Table A1 compares Mexico to other Latin American countries in terms of income per capita from 1990 to 2018. It shows that Mexico's per capita growth (34%) has fallen behind similar countries such as Chile (155%) and Colombia (72%), and it was below the average growth experienced within the whole region (41%). In terms of Human Development Index (HDI), Table A2 presents a fairly constant rate of improvement for the same period, but when adjusted by inequality (Table A3) Mexico's HDI falls from a value of 0.767 to 0.595. This represents an overall loss of 22.5%. A loss that is higher than the average loss of the group of countries with high HDI (17.9%) and to that of the world (20.2%). This fall is largely explained by income differences which is higher than the average of all other groups and the world.
In terms of inequality, other analyses reveal more clearly the severity of the situation. In 2013, the ratio of the share of disposable income of the richest 10% and the poorest 10% of Mexico showed the worst score of all OECD countries (30.5) in comparison to an average of 9.6 of all OECD countries (OECD, 2015b, p. 56). Equally concerning are HDI inequalities observed at the municipal level, in which, in 2015, the difference between the highest value (0.944) and the lowest value (0.420) was of 52 points. This difference is comparable to that between highest ranking countries (e.g. Switzerland) and countries at the bottom (e.g. Ethiopia) (PNUD, 2019). Moreover, inequality affects disproportionately the indigenous population (PNUD, 2010), and members of other groups such as the disabled, the elderly and immigrants (PNUD, 2011).
Finally, also relevant for the argument is the country's failure to safeguard people's basic political and civil rights and the state's incapacity to establish social order. Over the last decades, people in Mexico has been suffering from a severe crisis of human rights such as 'widespread killings, enforced disappearances, and torture committed by soldiers and police' (Human Rights Watch, 2015 7 ). The most emblematic example of this crisis has been the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students in 2014 in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, by the local police in collusion with a local gang (Estevez, 2014). But more worrying is the fact that the case of Ayotzinapa is part of a much larger problem which includes: more than 70,000 disappearances since 2006; a homicide rate of 29.1 per 100,000 habitants in 2018 -compared to an average of 5.8 8 ; as well as the systematic killing of journalists (Hernández, 2015); and a recent increase in gendered violence (ONUMujeres, n.d.).
Seen from this broader perspective, one would be uncertain -to say the least -to suggest that Mexico is indeed a more just society simply because there has been an expansion of the capabilities of the poor. 'Advancing justice' must not be reduced to expanding some basic capabilities of some people while leaving everything else unchanged. The bar of justice, even of imperfect justice, must be placed at a higher standard. As noted before, this conclusion is not a critique of Oportunidades itself nor about the reach of the programme and whether it must be associated with improvements in all these other areas which lie beyond its scope. Rather, showing Mexico's poor performance in the last decades in the above key areas, illuminates the fact that expanding people's capabilities (or reducing deprivations) by itself does not necessarily render a society more just -as seems to be implied in Sen's IJ. 9 This analysis already questions the usefulness of Sen's comparative justice to assess the justness of states of affairs. The next section examines how Sen's framework can be complemented so that it can become a more adequate guide for injustice-reducing actions in practice. I argue that paying adequate attention to the reproduction of injustice through social interactions, and including them within the scope of political action, could be one way forward. 7 See Human Rights Watch report 2015 available at http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapt ers/mexico. 8 Data available at https://dataunodc.un.org/. 9 Is true that, as recognised above, even in the case of Oportunidades itself, Sen would ask us to look beyond the resulting capabilities in order to account for the processes and agencies in the programme design and implementation. Still, I believe the main idea would remain. Issues of justice cannot be assessed in a piecemeal fashion. Perhaps a certain criterion of justice as capability expansion would be required (e.g. Nussbaum's list or other criteria) to address this concern.

Sen's IJ and the relational persistence of injustice
The extent to which Sen's conceptual framework is able to accommodate social relations, groups, collectivities and structures has been a much-debated topic in the literature (for a comprehensive review see Leßmann, 2020; see also Ibrahim, 2018). At risk of simplification, much of this discussion focuses around Sen's 'ethical individualism' (Robeyns, 2008b, p. 90) and its capacity to embrace fully the intrinsic and instrumental role that these relational aspects play in people's well-being and agency freedoms. To be sure, the argument is not about whether Sen's position is able to recognise the social embeddedness of individuals, but whether it is enough to capture these only indirectly through their 'contributions to [people's] freedom' (Sen, 1999, p. 142). My concern here is somehow related but situated in the context of discussions about practical justice.
In line with 'relational' approaches to justice, the focus of this section is on the role of social interaction in negating to some the freedom to be treated as an equal. Broadly speaking, scholars in this category have strongly criticised the overemphasis on distributive means to remedy injustice as they fail to address intersubjective injustices such as social practices of disrespect, discrimination and oppression within actual institutions (e.g. Anderson, 1999;Forst, 2014;Fraser, 1997;Pereira, 2013;Schemmel, 2011;Young, 1990;Wolff, 1998). For these scholars, justice requires being treated as an equal -rather than possessing equal amounts of whatever deemed necessary to achieve distributive justice (Wolff, 2015). Hence, a second concern is whether Sen's IJ normative guidance is well-equipped to direct political actions towards redressing relational injustice successfully.
What is distinctive about these injustices is that they involve a kind of disadvantage that happen in social interactions via cultural, symbolic or communicative wrongdoings. This includes any 'process, mechanism, context, institution, discourse or norm . . . [that] unjustly, asymmetrically, and systematically exclude, restrict or deprive people of their dignity, autonomy, rights or goods . . . who are signaled for reasons related to stigmas or social markers' (CONAPRED, 2012, p. 37; my translation) such as sexual orientation, colour of the skin, age, disabilities, and physical appearance (p. 19).
In Mexico, there is plenty of evidence of social interactions that constraints people's opportunities to be and do what they have reason to value. For instance, colloquial phrases such as 'it is not the Indian's fault, it is the fault of whoever made him the godfather' or 'we must improve the breed [i.e. race]', or, when the word 'Indian' is used as an insult, are expressions which suggest that some races are deemed superior than others (Camacho, 2014). Likewise, when Indians are portrayed as lazy, retrogrades, or as an 'obstacle in the road to development' (Gall, 2013), it automatically justifies inequalities and discrimination in favour of the privileged (CONAPRED, 2012). More formally, these social mechanisms have been documented in two National Surveys on Discrimination (ENADIS, 2005(ENADIS, , 2010) and a recent Report on Discrimination in Mexico (CONAPRED, 2012). 10 According to Székely, the results of the surveys expose 'a society with strong practices of exclusion, scorn, and discrimination against certain groups of people' which are 'strongly rooted and assumed in social culture ' (2006, p. 9) that 'damages millions of women and men from their birth to their grave' (CONAPRED, 2011, pp. 8-10).
In numbers, this gives us the following picture of relational injustice. According to the national survey in 2010, 55% of Mexicans affirm that persons are discriminated against because of their skin colour, and 35% of the population felt that their rights were not respected because of their personal appearance or skin colour. Given that 65% of the population define the colour of their skin as dark-skinned, these figures are telling. 71.4% of the population admit that the rights of indigenous people are not respected, and indigenous people themselves responded that the main problem faced by their group was discrimination. These studies also show that indigenous people do not enjoy the same opportunities to get a job because of their ethnicity and their physical appearance. In general, it is those from a poor background who are most discriminated against (CONAPRED, 2011a). Ultimately, these discriminatory practices and behaviours partly determine 'who can achieve a satisfactory income and who is marginalised for unjustified reasons' (CONAPRED, 2012, p. 78).
Beyond these statistics are stories of the lives of real women and men, such as indigenous women having to give birth outside of public hospitals because the personnel refused to attend them (Santaeulalia, 2013); or indigenous people arbitrarily detained, incarcerated and even tortured without due process for defending their territory of forced eviction (Tuckman, 2015); or highly ranked public servants who make fun of the way indigenous -or simply poor people -speak, look and dress (Tourliere, 2015). One of the most extreme expressions of this systematic social impairment is the case of Ayotzinapa mentioned above. This appalling event was justified or downplayed by many people using phrases such as 'damned shabby (nacos 11 ), they deserved it' and 'too much scandal for these f * * * filthy dark-skinned Indians! They are 100% replaceable by other 30 million lacras'. 12 Overall, these surveys and above examples of racial incidents reveal that injustice entails a relational aspect and thus, to advance justice, a practical 10 Both the surveys and the report are coordinated by the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED; acronym in Spanish). 11 Naco is a pejorative word often used in Mexico to describe ill-mannered, poorly educated people or those with bad taste. 12 Lacra is used to refer to a person who not only is cheap and freeloading but also uses others for his own ends without caring about other people.
conception of justice must be fit to address it. In this regard, Sen's approach seems promising at first. One of the distinguishing features of the concept of capabilities is its sensitivity to the different 'conversion factors' mediating the ability of individuals to transform resources into actual doings and beings (i.e. functionings). These include personal factors (e.g. age, proneness to illness, physical conditions), environmental factors (e.g. climate, geographical location), or social factors (e.g. social norms, public services, social valuations) (Robeyns, 2017(Robeyns, , 2005. Conversion factors aim to capture, for example, the vulnerability of a person with physical deficiencies, which inhibit her ability to convert food intake into the functioning of being well nourished, or to capture how social and relational circumstances affect a person's ability to translate a resource into a functioning. For example, girls may benefit from equal access to education but might be prevented from pursuing higher education because of social norms about a woman's place in society. As such, what I will dispute here is not that the notion of capability fails to capture the influence of relational mechanisms on individuals' lives (Pereira, 2013;Robeyns, 2003Robeyns, , 2017. Instead, what I dispute is how it tends to do so, and more importantly, its practical implication for the kind of policies it may inspire. While the analytical concept of 'conversion factors' is a valuable feature of the 'evaluative role' of a capability-assessment (Alkire, 2008), in practice, I argue, it can be useful in some cases but it can also be a misleading construct in other cases. To illustrate both, let us first consider the capability to live in a safe environment for someone who lives in an area prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes (an 'environmental conversion factor'). Certainly, her capability to live in a safe environment is compromised in comparison to people who live in safer areas. In this case, a 'capabilitarian' perspective (Robeyns, 2016) could point out to the different needs of different people in these two areas in terms of building materials (seismic resistant), the kind of public infrastructure required (specially designated safety area spaces), or even a possible extra resource for those who may have to abandon their houses temporarily or permanently. In this case, accounting for the environmental conversion does provide us with a better assessment of the situation and also may provide adequate guidance to deal with it. This is also the case for other conversion factors as in the case of a personal physical disability, such an elderly person with walking difficulties, which may imply that this person would need more resources to reach the same level of mobility as a younger person -such as a special scooter or public infrastructure like large road pavement.
However, it is when we have to deal practically with social and relational factors that problems might arise. 13 When social phenomena are treated in a similar way to other conversion factors, it runs the risk of being constructed as a fixed immutable condition that interferes in the conversion of resources or opportunities into actual functionings (e.g. as the geological crust or someone's age). Thus, similar to the previous examples, dealing practically with social and relational factors would be simply a matter of justifying the transfer of more resources to different persons according to their requirements to achieve the desired functioning. Consider Sen's own example taken from Adam Smith of not being able to 'appear in public without shame'. To redress this kind of unfreedom, Sen recommends 'higher standards of clothing and other visible consumption'. Likewise, he also suggests that a similar logic 'may [also] apply to the personal resources needed for the fulfilment of [the relational notions of] self-respect' (Sen, 1999, p. 71;emphasis added;IJ, p. 255). Elsewhere, he claims that sometimes 'more income is needed to buy enough commodities to achieve the same social functioning' (Sen, 1999, p. 89;emphasis in original).
To illustrate why this is problematic, we can go back to Oportunidades. Its focus on conversion factors entails accounting for social and relational factors in the form of gender biases that disadvantage girls in education (as expressed by lower enrolment rates for girls). This, in turn, results in the programme providing more resources (a higher scholarship stipend) for girls than for boys from secondary education onwards -when the drop-out rates of girls are higher -as means to redress this situation. While this may illustrate the usefulness of taking into account people's conversion factors, it also confirms my concern. It illustrates that relational factors run the risk of being taken into account only as an object that affects people's conversion of resources into capabilities, while potentially excluding them from any normative scrutiny or policy intervention. In other words, from a capability perspective, social processes run the risk of being constructed as an objective factor that can increase or decrease the intensity of individuals' deprivation, which in turn can be subsumed in the amount of resources devoted to them.
Such conceptualisation of in/justice puts all the focus of policy action on the individual deprivations. Consequently, reducing poverty risks becoming simply a matter of restoring what the person is lacking (income, access to education, health, participation), while leaving the underlying injustice-generating social processes out of the scope of political action. This understanding of injustice (i.e. as an individual lack of capabilities) is too narrow and must be broadened since it has, at least, two related undesirable implications.
First, it reinforces the idea that the 'causes' of injustice can be found in what the person herself lacks. It is not uncommon, for example, to find references to Oportunidades as a programme that focuses on 'the causes of poverty (lack of education) and not just its consequences (low incomes)' (Székely & Fuentes, 2002, p. 132). In a similar vein, Levy (1991), suggests that the remedies against poverty must enable the poor to '"get on their feet" and work their way out of poverty' (p. 53). Second, it creates a fictional division between how the life of one person is going from the doings and beings of the rest of the society in which people's deprivations take place. For instance, even if Oportunidades takes into account the fact that others devalue the worth of education for girls, it does not intend to address how and by whom these biases that lead girls (or any person) to experience unequal access to valuable opportunities are reproduced and why. Similarly, when Sen recommends 'higher standards of clothing' for people to appear in public without shame, he also forgets to pass normative judgment to the social mechanisms and interactions that directly shame others.
Together, these implications artificially construct poverty as a problem of individuals themselves. Thus, from this perspective, if indigenous people in Mexico are worse off than the rest of the population, then it is because they are not educated, not healthy, not productive, and so on. Accordingly, the remedy would be to guarantee their access to education, health services, labour markets, and so on (precisely as Oportunidades and now Prospera aim to do). But can we disassociate their poverty from other people's behaviour and the interpersonal interactions of discrimination they face? In Mexico, the returns of an extra year of education, the quality of public services they receive, and the opportunities to get a job (or receive equal pay for the same job) are systematically lower for indigenous people in comparison to the non-indigenous population (PNUD, 2010). Addressing these 'conversion social factors' that prevent indigenous people to convert an extra year of education into better job opportunities would require going beyond restoring the capabilities indigenous people are lacking, to include a direct evaluation of the mechanisms (actions, attitudes and relations) that partially determine and perpetuate people's disadvantages -as relational justice emphasise.
As such, the translation of Sen's IJ into practice is in great need of revision. For, to reduce injustice effectively, we must regard relational factors as a function of human action and intersubjective processes (Young, 1990) rather than as an 'objective constraint' (Young, 2011, p. 53) as if 'social facts are things, independent of human action' (p. 56). Hence, one must not assume that just because the concept of capability can easily be stretched to account for a variety of factors (environmental, social, personal), it is automatically qualified to influence policy in the right direction to successfully overcome injustice on its own. This finding should be equally relevant for relational scholars who find in the capability approach a useful metric for their own concerns (e.g. Anderson, 1999;Pereira, 2013).

Conclusion
In The Idea of Justice, Sen presents his comparative method as a framework for 'wrestl [ing] injustices in the world in which we live' aiming at 'advanc [ing] justice through enhancing the liberties and freedoms and well-being of people who live today' (p. 81). However, he falls short of putting to critical scrutiny the reach of his comparative framework for advancing justice. To fill this gap, this paper has drawn on the Mexican CCT Oportunidades as an example to assess the extent to which Sen's IJ is actually able to do what it claims to do, that is, being an approach to social justice that can offer guidelines to reduce injustice in practice.
The paper has argued that his comparative framework needs further revision in two aspects. First, I argued that if a justice-enhancing change must lead towards a fairer, freer, and more just world for all in the long run, then by treating injustices in a case-by-case fashion (as separated from the broader structural context), Sen's IJ can (mis)judge a situation as justice-enhancing even when there seems to be no improvement overall. Second, I argued that Sen's comparative framework remains insufficient to promote justiceenhancing change. I argued that this is because of the way it (mis)constructs injustice as simply the lack of individual capabilities, which in turn fails to challenge normatively the way in which injustice is reproduced and perpetuated via social interactions.
Ultimately, this calls for a conceptual shift in the understanding of injustice towards a broader relational perspective, which reflects the fact that persons are always immersed in social processes and interactions either with the state, institutions or with others. It also implies that policy guidance needs to be broader in scope and to address, in addition to capability deprivation, the actual behaviours and interactions that reinforce and maintain such an unjust outcome. That is, what is of policy concern for creating a more just society is not only what the poor do (or not do) and are (or are not) but also what others do and are (Young, 2011). It is because Sen's guidance is prone to fail to appreciate this that it may remain incomplete and insufficient to counteract injustice effectively. Successfully enhancing individuals' capabilities in terms of education, health, and so on, may not be enough to rectify injustices unless the relational mistreatments which cause capability deprivations are also addressed and altered.
This might be particularly relevant for the context of Mexico -as well as other societies -, which despite its continual efforts, has not made much progress in being a more just society. Not only has it failed in terms of inequality and poverty but also in the most basic and fundamental aspect of justice, namely the recognition of people's equal dignity whatever the colour of skin. It is urgent for discussions about justice to focus efforts beyond improving the lot of the poor. Although Sen's IJ and its comparative assessment in the capability space provides a useful start, how can it be broadened so that it can promote social changes that address both individual deprivations and the relational mechanisms underlying their deprivation, remains an ongoing task.