Purpose and topics

Policy designers and decision makers need often to account for « qualities: quality of life, urban quality, vulnerability and resilience of a territory;  or they deal with complex social phenomena such as poverty, citizenship, empowerment, and so on.
For many such issues it seems crucial to be able to provide adequate « measures » aiming at building some evidence within the decision process.
Such measurements need to comply both with formal (measurement theory) and operational requirements (usefulness), which may not always be easy to satisfy. In order to explore if and how this may be possible, the measurement process need to be enframed into some formal theory.
The specific focus of the workshop is to explore the capability approach as one such (unifying) framework.
The workshop aims at analysing specific cases of « quality measures », as well as discuss more general theoretical contributions on how such measures can be conceptualised, modelled and operationally undertaken.
It is our objective to explore directions for further research and paths for cooperation.