I tried posting this as a comment on the self-efficacy post but it wouldn't take. Let's see if it works now

There are two issues as we introduce the idea of CA that need to be reconciled. The first is the issue of self-efficacy and the need to believe not only are you capable of development but that you actually have the freedom to develop along the trajectory you wish to develop. And the second is the issue of capability as a whole, and how capability is not an aggregate way of looking at the world, but an individual way in which each individual makes his or her own choice. On Friday I had an hour long conversation - well you could call it argument - with a colleague about the development of schools. I made the argument that the focus on the establishment of schools should be local. All that the larger institutions should do is to provide the resources that allow for a general capability and that the communities be allowed to develop their own schools out of these capabilities. My colleague argued that while you should definitely give a voice to the local community there is also a necessity to bring some level of control back to the district level, back to the institutions. Her fear, and I think it is a good one, is that local control will lead to a concretization of what is dysfunctional about a community. They will never be able to grow. Let us say you have a specific community which forces women to wear a burka. If you allow local organizations to develop and run schools completely independently are you simply reinforcing the oppressive nature of a community towards some elements of its population?
At the same time if I come in and tell you there are certain ways that your community must be what does that do to freedom. And how would that work in terms of self-efficacy? Meaning if we tell individuals they must not have schools where females are forced to wear burkas what does that mean to the population of women who make the free choice to wear burkas and are forced not to (something that is happening in France right now.)
I believe there are three key points which we need to make and think about how they relate to the issue of human development all together. The first, and perhaps most important, is the issue of information. One of the keys for Sen and CA in general is the ability not only to access information but also to use it as a tool in developing a life trajectory. This gets to Travis' idea on using Friere as well. His whole idea of teaching literacy is not that you have it as a skill in and of itself, but that you have it as a tool. The reading involves the access of information while the dialogue it is looking to foster involves the use of information. This is why we are not just looking to develop bonding social capital within the community, but synergistic social capital in which the community trusts and incorporates the information it gets from the world around them (which in an of itself is a necessity). There is an integral link between information and human development that for some reason traditoinal theories of human development simply don't tap into. Information is almost seen as something separate. And I think this is something new that CA brings to the study of human development - actually though it really does reflect Dewey in some ways.
The second issue is that CA is more of an abductive theory than a deductive theory, and we have to look at human development abductively. For the most part theories of human development take a deductive approach, and this is how they are translated either into education or into interventions. We set the premise and then we attempt to develop hypothesis where those premises can be used to make the lives of individuals better. It is, in essence, a perspective based on constraints. So we assume that when we remove our own constraints the community will replace them with their own deductive constraints. Individuals must act in a certain way because these are the premises we set up in terms of what makes your life happy, or worthwhile, or puts it on a positive trajectory. But what if we are able to start establishing an approach to human development that was more about novelty than constraints. Communities would initially fear this, there is no doubt, but CA definitely brings us closer to this.
Third is the idea that there are universal values. The values are process oriented rather than product oriented. It is part of the Aristotelian approach of CA which Sen refers to but can never really buy into. But as we read Nussbaum more and more we will get an idea of what this means.