The UN and Human Development

developing countries repaid their debts.

Structural adjustment dominated economic
policymaking in Latin America and Africa during
the 1980s and much of the 1990s. Structural
adjustment priorities became a condition for
receiving support from the Bretton Woods
institutions but were also reinforced by donors
who coordinated their own support around these
policies.

The vision of putting people at the centre of

development has long been a theme of the
United Nations, but one whose priority and
practical importance has waxed and waned. The
Preamble of the UN Charter referred to the
dignity and worth of the human person, equal
rights of men and women, and the need to
promote social progress and better standards of
living in larger freedom. Human goals were
embodied from the beginning in the articles of
association of several of the UNs specialized
agencies. Notwithstanding these ambitions, the
UN for many years failed to develop an
integrated intellectual framework for a humancentered approach to economic and social
development.

In 1990, partly in response to this

inhospitable environment, the UNDP launched
the first annual Human Development Report
(HDR), which promoted a comprehensive vision
of a people-focused strategy as an alternative to
neoliberal analysis and policy. The reports of the
series brought the concept of human
development to worldwide attention and gave it
economic breadth and philosophical depth. They
also attracted exceptional media attention, in
both developed and developing countries. In
addition to presenting a new paradigm for
economic and social development, successive
reports expounded the approach in relation to
key areas: inequality, public finance,
participation, gender, economic growth,
globalization, technology, culture, human rights,
and other domains.

The first time that an operational and

intellectually coherent vision of a people-focused
development strategy emerged was in the 1970s,
when the ILO World Employment Programme
developed a strategy for meeting basic needs.
This strategy emerged from careful analyses at
country level of problems of employment,
poverty, and inequality in a dozen or more
countries. Comprehensive employment strategy
missions visited Colombia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, the
Philippines, Sudan, and other countries, while
their conclusions were generalized by an
ambitious research program. This led to the
preparation of a synthesis of required actions
that became embodied in Employment, Growth
and Basic Needs: A One World Problem, the
basic document submitted to the 1976 ILO
World Employment Conference.

Within a year or two, many individual

countries began producing their own human
development reports, applying the paradigm to
their own national problems and policies. By now,
well over 600 such national Human Development
Reports have been produced in some 140
countries. In addition, a number of regional
Human Development Reports have been issued,
most notably four outspoken reports for the
Arab region and a series of annual regional
reports for South Asia prepared by the Mahbub
ul Haq Human Development Centre in Islamabad.
Numerous books and articles about human
development have also appeared, and the
Journal of Human Development has been
published regularly since 2000. The International
Association for Human Development and
Capabilities now has a membership approaching
a thousand members in some seventy countries
that explores a broad range of development
issues and undertakes research.

After that conference, the basic needs

strategy surged to global attention. Meeting
basic needs or basic human needs became the
dominant development priority, capturing the
attention of donors and winning the support of
World Bank president Robert McNamara and
others in positions of international leadership.
In spite of this early and rapid rise to
prominence, the basic needs strategy
disappeared from the political scene within five
years. Its demise in the early 1980s was the
result of a return to economic orthodoxy, which
was driven by three factors: the rise of
Thatcherism and Reaganism in developed
countries, the onset of world recession, and
banking policies designed to ensure that

What is Human Development?

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as means to these human ends, not as ends in

themselves.

Human development was formally defined in the

first Human Development Report as a process
of enlarging peoples choices. The most critical
of these wide-ranging choices are to live a long
and healthy life, to be educated and to have
access to resources needed for a decent
standard of living. Additional choices include
political freedom, guaranteed human rights and
personal self-respect (1).

Indicators of Human
development
To draw attention to these ends, the Human
Development Report now uses four key
indicators:

In later reports and in work outside the UN,

the concept has been refined and elaborated.
For example, human development as a paradigm
now emphasizes broadening choices and
strengthening capabilities, based on conceptual
and analytical work by Nobel laureate Amartya
Sen and Martha Nussbaum, among many others.

In explaining capabilities, Sen has stressed

the contrast between the great things that
human beings can achieve and the limited lives
most women and men end up having. This
tension is a starting point for the human
development approach, which, in his Foreword
to Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and A.K. Shiva Kumars
edited volume Readings in Human Development
(2003), he underlines, draws on the
magnificence of human potentiality amidst the
widespread experience of narrowly
circumscribed lives. Lack of schooling, meager
healthcare, inadequate economic opportunities,
violation of political liberties, denial of civil rights,
other hostile winds can totally frustrate human
beings despite their potential to ascend on the
wings (vii).

An important contrast is thus between

economic prosperity and human development
between economic achievements measured by
GNP per capita and human achievements
measured by a range of human indicators.
Although there is a weak correlation between
the two, the data shows that many developing
countries do poorly on many social and human
rights indicators in spite of achieving reasonable
rates of economic growthand vice versa.
Countries can make significant progress in
human development even with slow economic
growth, at least for a decade or so.
Notwithstanding such evidence, the pursuit of
economic growth is typically taken as the central
goal of economic policymaking. In contrast, the
human development approach concentrates on
people-focused objectives and emphasizes that
economic and political actions should be treated

HDI, the Human Development Index: a

summary of human development in a
country that measures the average
achievements of people along three
dimensions: living a long and healthy life,
as measured by life expectancy at birth;
being knowledgeable, as measured by a
combination of the adult literacy rate
and the combined enrollment ratio in
primary, secondary, and tertiary
education; and having access to a
decent standard of living, as measured
by an index of income per capita (GDP
measured in PPP US$ to achieve
international comparability).
GDI, the Gender-related Development
Index: an indicator that adjusts the
average HDI achievement to reflect
inequalities between men and women
along the three basic dimensions.
GEM, the Gender Empowerment Measure:
an indicator that focuses on the
opportunities open to women. It
measures inequality of opportunities in
three areas: political participation and
decision making; economic participation
and decision making; and power over
economic resources.
HPI, the Human Poverty Index: an index
that measures deprivations along the
basic dimensions of human development.
It combines the proportion of people in a
country expected to die at a relatively
early age (40 years in developing
countries,60 years in developed
countries); illiteracy; and poor access to
the overall economic resources needed
for a decent standard of living.

Human development indices were one of the

innovations of the reports; they deliberately
shifted attention from an exclusive
preoccupation with economic indicators such as
GNP per capita to human indicators. Although

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countries, and policies toward multinational

enterprises.

aspects of these indicators can be criticizedas

can all composite indicatorsMahbub ul Haqs
justification, as noted by Sen in his special
contribution to the Human Development Report
1999, is worth quoting: We need a measure of
the same level of vulgarity as GNPjust one
numberbut a measure that is not as blind to
social aspects of human lives as GNP is (23).

The ILO World Employment Conference in

1976 considered the basic needs strategy and
agreed on many follow-up actions for both
individual countries and the international
community. In spite of some bitter ideological
differences, a remarkable and unusually broad
consensus developed for the implementation of
the strategy. After the election of President
Jimmy Carter, the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) also began to promulgate
the basic human needs approach.

Basic Needs, the Precursor

The ILOs pioneering work on basic needs in the
1970s helped lay the foundation for the human
development approach two decades later. Both
wereand still arebroad ranging and
comprehensive strategies for economic and
social development that provide a framework for
analysis and guidelines for policy. In some
respects, the basic needs approach has the edge
in being more easily understandable and readily
operational and the human development
approach has the edge in having greater breadth
of applications and more robust philosophical
foundations.

For five years, it seemed that these bold

initiatives would be undertaken. Many donors
individually and in Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development forums
expressed support for basic needs prioritiesso
much so that some developing countries began
to be suspicious of their intentions. World Bank
president Robert McNamara, encouraged by
Mahbub ul Haq, who at that time was his senior
adviser, and some other senior staff expressed
interest and support. Yet before serious
programs could get under way, the international
mood turned very negative. Both Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan brought a sharp
swing to monetarist and more traditional
economic policies with too little social conscience
and too much ideological opposition to state help.
Moreover, the economic climate was
deteriorating as a result of the second round of
increases in oil prices in 1979. An economic
slowdown became a recession. The earlier
support (at times even euphoria) for basic needs
went into reverse because of the single-minded
focus on economic policies of stabilization and
adjustment.

As a dynamic strategy for development, the

basic needs approach prioritized ensuring that
the poorest group of each country should
achieve a minimum standard of living within a
defined time horizonoriginally the end of the
twentieth century, which was about twenty-five
years from when the basic needs strategy was
first formulated. The strategy required a country
to give attention to two elements of basic needs:
ensuring the provision of certain minimum
requirements of a family for private consumption
(adequate food, shelter, and clothing); and,
ensuring that essential services were provided
by and for the community at large (safe drinking
water, sanitation, public transport, health, and
education). Participation and human rights were
included in the definition of basic needs.

The result was that mainstream

development thinking and policy shifted to an
unwavering focus on economic growth, justified
by the belief that economic indicators were and
ought to be at the core of development. Much
of this still continues. Many still argue that
economic growth will generate the other things
necessary for people to live the good life. The
appeal of trickle-down economicslike
neoclassical economicsis not just the analytical
strength of the economic theory, which was
developed in some of the worlds best
universities, but also the way that its priorities
match the economic and political interests and

Meeting basic needs was presented as

universal, applicable to all countries, a rare and
new feature for the time and one repeated in the
human development approach. The World
Employment Programme stressed that a
strategy of fast economic growth and
redistribution of the fruits of growth had to be
backed up by international policies that covered
elements of international trade, development
assistance, foreign direct investment, migration
policies, technological innovation for developing

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more than the ongoing theme of UNDPs annual

report. Even within the UNDP, human
development was initially treasured as much for
the publicity that the report launches gathered
each year as for the content of the HDRs.
Gradually, however, the messages of the reports
have gained influence, reinforced by the
involvement of field offices in the 140 countries
where national Human Development Reports
have been prepared.

ideology of the major powers and more

developed countries.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the focus of
mainstream economic ideology was reinforced
by structural adjustment conditionalities. These
imperatives were force-fed to developing
countries that were in need of loans from the
Bretton Woods institutions. The results were
devastating, especially for the majority of the
least-developed countries and were thus
adopted by the majority of countries in Africa
and Latin America. In the last few years,
economic research has made clear that the cost
of these policies was high in terms of their
negative effects on economic growth and
education, health, and other social services.
Moreover, the ongoing global economic crisis,
brought on by excesses in the financial and
banking sectors of developed countries, has
shown the severe costs of failing to exercise
adequate supervision and regulation of free
markets.

Missed Opportunities and

Critiques
If we move from ideas to implementation,
human development as an integrating frame for
UN operations still exists more as a hope and a
vision than as a reality. Too often, UN agencies
fail to see its relevance as an analytical
framework within which their own operations
could be set. UNDAF, the UN Development
Assistance Framework, is still the formal frame
within which country-level activities of various
UN agencies are to be coordinated. The UNDAF
is useful for coordinating the various
components of UN programs but not for
establishing a coherent human development
strategy. The missed opportunities are all the
greater when the UN fails to show how the
objectives and programs of peace, economic and
social development, and human rights go well
beyond the narrower economic philosophies and
more limited objectives of the Bretton Woods
institutions.

Significance for the UN System

The most important contribution of the human
development approach for the UN as a whole is
that it brought together and integrated the four
fundamental ideas on which the world body had
been founded: peace and negotiation in place of
war and conflict; sovereign independence;
economic and social development to achieve
higher living standards; and human rights for all.
Although each of these was central to the
Charter, each largely became a separate pursuit,
both operationally and conceptually, during the
UNs first four decades.

Human development is still too often seen as

little more than sectoral concerns with education,
health, and nutritionwhich is what the World
Bank means when it uses the term. The infinitely
broader and richer meanings of human
development, as developed by Sen and Haq and
presented in the annual Human Development
Reports, are missing.

Human development has shown how these

four fundamental ideas are integral parts of a
more holistic approach to development, a
comprehensive perspective that combines
human rights, economic and social advance,
self-determination, peace and human security,
and participation and empowerment. Human
Development Reports have analyzed these links
and interconnections. This holistic approach to
human development has underlined why and
how the four need to be pursued together. This
was an important intellectual leap forward.

More serious is the failure to develop a clear,

comprehensive, and positive macro-economic
strategy within which UN member states and
agencies can pursue human development goals
True, priorities for finance, consumption,
distribution, economic growth, and other aspects
of national and international macro-development
policy have often been analyzed in human
development reports. But this ensemble still falls
short of a coherent presentation of a
comprehensive macro-economic strategy toward

The human development approach is still far

from accepted throughout the UN system, many
parts of which treat human development as little

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human development. In comparison, the basic

needs approach not only had a twenty-five-year
strategy but objectives that were both easy to
understand and convincing to those concerned
with ending poverty.

Conclusion
The strength of the human development
approach lies in its focus on broadening choices
and strengthening human capabilities and its
concern with issues neglected by neoliberalism,
such as care for children and the aged and
gender equality and intra-household income
distribution. These concerns are important for
strengthening human values and capabilities.
But they do not fit easily or reasonably in a
neoliberal framework, which focuses on
maximization of returns and market efficiency.

In this respect, the Millennium Development

Goals (MDGs) are a mixed blessing. The
consensus established in the 1970s for meeting
basic needs transmogrifiedafter two or three
decades of structural adjustmentinto a
consensus for meeting the MDGs by 2015. These
goals were essentially a UN creation that grew
out of the long experience of the world
organization in proposing goals and using them
as guidelines for their own operations. But in
one key respect the MDGs missed a major
elementa macroeconomic strategy. This was
de facto left to the Bretton Woods institutions,
with the IMF in particular having a critical
behind-the-scenes role.

Sharp differences exist in the modalities of

human development compared to neoliberalism.
The human development approach emphasizes
three areas of concern. First, it underlines the
need for the inclusion of a broader group of
governmental and nongovernmental actors in
decision-making processes. In government,
policymaking cannot be left to economic and
financial decision makers alone. Other ministries
or departments, particularly those concerned
with nutrition, health, and education, need to be
a part of the process. Outside of government,
local communities need to be included to ensure
a human focus and a clear understanding of
available options.

The result is that the prevailing

macroeconomic strategy largely continues along
conventional neoliberal economic lines in which
the concept of redistribution with growth is
largely absent. Even policies for accelerating
economic growth are often missing from the
economic orthodoxy of the Washington
consensus. In contrast, accelerated economic
growth with redistribution was an integral
element of the macroeconomic strategy for
meeting basic needs in the 1970s.

Second, the human development approach

broadens the scope of indicators used to monitor
development. In place of neoliberalisms sharp
focus on economic and financial indicators as a
means to human ends, human development
relies on a wider range of human and social
indicators that are given primary place as ends
in themselves. Thus special importance is given
to indicators that track the human situation: life
expectancy, nutritional status, and ultimately of
well-being and happiness. In this regard, human
development is similar to the basic needs
approach of the 1970s.

The question should also be asked why the

human development approachin spite of huge
media and public attentionhas not succeeded
in generating large-scale attention among social
scientists, national and international civil
servants, and politicians. Why are the First UN
and the Second UN not more involved? And why
are more members of the Third UN not on the
barricades to press for the implementation of
this ideal?
The approach has received strong support
from many NGOs and social scientists (outside
the economics profession) but not beyond. There
are several possible explanations. Many take
human development as goals but give too little
attention to the policy implications that come
with the goals. Although the Human
Development Reports have explored policy
linkages, the public attention given to the goals
and indicators too readily dominates the
message.

Third, there are differences in the two

approaches that reflect different attitudes
toward international policy. The urgency of
human development needs requires stronger
international action and more rapid and flexible
support, financially in access to markets and in
other forms such as peace operations. Moreover,
the values and principles at the heart of the
human development approach extend far
beyond neoliberalisms preoccupation with

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economic efficiency and include human rights,

justice, and human solidarity.
Such human development priorities are not
unrealistic, although some observers dismiss
them as such. Examples of the implementation
of virtually every element of the human
development approach can be found somewhere
in recent years at a reasonable cost and often
with considerable success. Human development
is closely aligned with the human rights
commitments that most governments have
adopted. Nevertheless, it is true that human
development as a paradigm has yet to be fully
grasped, even within the United Nations.
Human development not only matches the
values and needs of the world organization at
present but it also provides a framework that is
well adapted for the future. Ongoing challenges
in the twenty-first century include global
warming and other environmental problems,
extreme inequality within and between countries,
and the widespread need for more inclusive
democracy in countries around the globe. There
is also a need to shift from military to human
security. Human development provides a
framework within which such issues can be
explored, their implications analyzed, and
policies adopted within countries and
internationally.
In brief, the human development framework
establishes priorities to guide the UN and its
member states in their responses to present and
future needs, nationally and internationally.
Taking it more seriously as the basis for action is
one of the challenges for the world body in the
years ahead.
Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij and Thomas G.
Weiss

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