Contribution of the capability approach to the building process of the European Higher Education Area. Theoretical discussion and practical proposals to foster democratic citizenship into University Dr. Alejandra Boni and Dr. J. Felix Lozano Group of Studies on Development, International Cooperation and Applied Ethics GREVOL Group Technical University of Valencia Contact: aboni@dpi.upv.es Projects Engineering Department, ETSII, Technical University of Valencia Camino de Vera s/nº, 46022 Valencia, Spain. 1. Introduction We are witnessing increasing concern over the future of higher education in Europe for two reasons: the desire to be the most competitive knowledge economy in the world – as stated at the Lisbon Summit in 2000 – and the desire to obtain a more integrated European citizenship. Tertiary education plays a major role in achieving both objectives and on that basis, the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is being developed. Despite the critics and the problems, progress towards building a single area of European higher education continues. In this paper, our purpose is to discuss the possibility of using the Capability Approach (CA) framework to criticize and complement the competences discourse on which EHEA is based and to analyze the fundamental knowledge, abilities, skills and values that must be promoted in education processes to encourage democratic citizenship in accordance with CA. Firstly, we will compare the concept of competence proposed in the Tuning Project, a European survey which is informing the new degrees in Europe and Latin-American countries with the concept of capability. More deeply, we will contrast the list of competences proposed in the Tuning Project with the list of capabilities for higher education proposed by Walker (2006). 1