The concept of human development expands upon the notion of economic development to include social, political and even ethical dimensions. Since the mid-twentieth century, international organisations such as the United Nations and the World Bank have adopted human development as a holistic approach to evaluate a country’s progress that considers living conditions, social relations, individual freedoms and political institutions that contribute to freedom and well-being, in addition to standard measures of income growth. The United Nations Development Programme defines human development as "the process of enlarging people's choices", such choices allowing people to "lead a long and healthy life, to get educated, to enjoy a decent standard of living", as well as "political freedom, other guaranteed human rights and various ingredients of self-respect". Thus, human development is about much more than economic growth, which is only a means of enlarging people's choices. Some organizations, such as the Catholic Church and the Organization of American States, use the term "integral development" to reflect something wider than "economic" development.
History Human Development has roots in ancient philosophy and early economic theory. Aristotle noted that "Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful for something else", and Adam Smith and Karl Marx were concerned with human capabilities. The theory grew in importance in the 1980s with the work of Amartya Sen and his Human Capabilities perspective, which played a role in his receiving the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Notable early active economists who formulated the modern concept of human development theory were Mahbub ul Haq, Üner Kirdar, and Amartya Sen. The Human Development Index developed for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) stems from this early research. In 2000, Sen and Sudhir Anand published a notable development of the theory to address issues in sustainability. Martha Nussbaum's publications in the late 1990s and 2000s pushed theorists to pay more attention to the human in the theory, and particularly to human emotion. A separate approach stems in part from needs theories of psychology which in part started with Abraham Maslow (1968). Representative of these are the Human-Scale Development approach developed by Manfred Max-Neef in the mid-to-late 1980s which addresses human needs and satisfiers which are more or less static across time and context. Anthropologists and sociologists have also challenged perspectives on Human Development Theory that stem from neoclassical economics. Examples of scholars include, Diane Elson, Raymond Apthorpe, Irene van Staveren, and Ananta Giri. Elson (1997) proposes that human development should move towards a more diverse approach to individual incentives. This will involve a shift from seeing people as agents in control of their choices selecting from a set of possibilities utilizing human capital as one of many assets. Instead, theorists should see people as having more mutable choices influenced by social structures and changeable capacities and using a humanistic approach to theory including factors relating to an individual's culture, age, gender, and family roles. These extensions express a dynamic approach to the theory, a dynamism that has been advocated by Ul Haq and Sen, in spite of the implicit criticism of those two figures. In an attempt to promote human development, the United Nations supports decennial Earth Summits where UN members discuss a plan of action called Agenda 21 – an agenda to make sure humanity will still be around after the year 2100. Thousands of cities now have a local Agenda 21 and more and more companies and organisations also align their strategic plan with the strategic plan of Agenda21. With the approaching of the year 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was compelled to develop something that existed in the private sector: setting out a long term plan, a mid term plan and a short term planning. This endeavour supports on Agenda21 and was named the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which ran from 2000–2015. The United Nations made a commitment to accomplish these goals by 2015 and thus make an attempt to promote human development. As the experience of this exercise was perceived successful, a follow-up program was developed and named as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Measurements of human development
There are six basic pillars of human development: equity, sustainability, productivity, empowerment, cooperation and security.
Equity is the idea of fairness for every person, between men and women; we each have the right to education and health care. Sustainability is the view that we all have the right to earn a living that can sustain our lives and have access to a more even distribution of goods. Productivity states the full participation of people in the process of income generation. This also means that the government needs more efficient social programs for its people. Empowerment is the freedom of the people to influence development and decisions that affect their lives. Cooperation stimulates participation and belonging to communities and groups as a means of mutual enrichment and a source of social meaning. Security offers people development opportunities freely and safely with confidence that they will not disappear suddenly in the future.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
