Human Development Reports HDRs

'''Human Development Reports HDRs '''

discussion        “The Human Development Reports (HDRs), published annually for UNDP since 1990, have used Amartya Sen’s capability approach as a conceptual framework in their analyses of contemporary development challenges. […] Sen’s ideas provide the core principles of a development approach whose flexible framework allows policy-makers to analyze diverse challenges that poor people and poor countries face, rather than imposing a rigid orthodoxy with a set of policy prescriptions. […]

The report is not just any report that the UNDP might commission on a given development theme, nor is it a status report for monitoring development. It has a much broader ambition, namely setting out a comprehensive approach to development, including an agenda of policy priorities, tools of analysis and measurement, and a coherent conceptual framework. As Richard Jolly (2003) notes:

‘[The] Human Development (HD) approach embodies a robust paradigm, which may be contrasted with the neoliberal (NL) paradigm of the Washington consensus. There are points of overlap, but also important points of difference in objectives, assumptions, constraints and in the main areas for policy and in the indicators for assessing results.’

To launch the HDRs, Haq brought together a group of fellow development economists and friends, among them Paul Streeten and Frances Stewart, who had worked with him on the basic needs approach; Gus Ranis and Keith Griffin, his collaborators in Pakistan; and others, such as Sudhir Anand and Meghnad Desai, who had creative expertise in quantitative methods. Dozens more who shared his vision also contributed (Haq 1995). But it was Sen’s work on capabilities and functionings that provided the strong conceptual foundation for the new paradigm. His approach defined human development as the process of enlarging a person’s ‘functionings and capabilities to function, the range of things that a person could do and be in her life,’ expressed in the HDRs as expanding ‘choices’ (Amartya Sen 1989).

Sen would continue to influence the evolution of the human development approach, refining and broadening the basic concepts and measurement tools as new areas of policy challenges were tackled, from sustainable development (United Nations Development Programme 1994) to gender equality (United Nations Development Programme 1995), poverty (United Nations Development Programme 1997), consumption and sustainable development (United Nations Development Programme 1998), human rights (United Nations Development Programme 2000), and democracy (United Nations Development Programme 2002). In turn, the HDRs have paralleled Sen’s own work on freedom, participation, and agency, incorporating more explicit references to human rights and freedoms. With Anand, Sen also played a critical role in developing the measurement tools of human development, starting with the Human Development Index (HDI) and going on to cover issues such as gender equality – the Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) were developed in 1995 – and the measurement of poverty in human lives rather than incomes through the Human Poverty Index (HPI), published in the 1997 HDR.

Thus, while Sen helped develop the initial conceptual framework and measurement tools used in the HDRs, the reports carried Sen’s work even further as they explored the policy implications of this development approach in areas that are of major contemporary significance.” (Fukuda-Parr 2003: 301-303)