http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/21584/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/38904/ 2013-02-01T00:00:00Z The Human Development Report 2007/8 (HDR) and the World Development Report 2010 (WDR) are both devoted to the connections between climate change and development. The reports provide very different perspectives on where the key challenges reside. Their policy proposals are also different, but much less so. Using a combination of frame and content analysis complemented with attention to how these institutions and their knowledge production processes operate, the paper develops a structured comparison of the problem-framing and solution-framing in the Overviews of the two reports. It compares the reports' conceptions of development; their normative content and the roles given to human rights; the pathways and solutions the agencies defend, and how protective they are of the poor; the status given to proposed market solutions; what types of information and expert perspective are prioritized and why, and which issues are neglected. Following its stress on human rights and ethical principles, the HDR does not unsettle the market driven solutions to climate change that dominate the global policy arena. Different policy instruments and a fuller institutionalization of its human rights concerns is required, in organizations, processes, methodologies and knowledge networks that could move the ideas forward and continually press for their use. This may require a different model of report preparation. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/37292/ 2012-08-01T00:00:00Z University quality and its measurement have been strongly on the agenda of university policy since the 1980s. There is no consensus about what a good university is, but increasingly priority has been given to a narrow focus on contribution to supporting economic production and growth, as part of an economy-centred and market-centred conception of society. We argue that a human development approach is also very often relevant in educational policy and evaluation and can assist us to define and characterize a good university. From the following core values of human development—well-being, participation and empowerment, equity and diversity, and sustainability— we propose a list of dimensions for a human development orientation in research, teaching, social engagement and university governance, and then discuss the implications of these values and how they can be used in evaluation and steering of universities’ work. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/32446/ 2012-04-01T00:00:00Z The paper assesses the rationale, contributions, structure, and challenges of the field of development ethics. Processes of social and economic transformation involve great risks and costs and great opportunities for gain, but the benefits, costs, and risks are typically hugely unevenly and inequitably distributed, as is participation in specifying what they are and their relative importance. The ethics of development examines the benefits, costs, risks, formulations, participation, and options. The paper outlines a series of ways of characterizing such work, arguments for and against its importance, and some of its major sources and contributions, especially from the interdisciplinary stream of work represented over several decades by Denis Goulet. Definitions are diverse since the work covers many different intersections of practice and theorizing, at multiple levels. The paper considers and replies to arguments against discussing development ethics: the claim that it involves only endless proliferation of different opinions, is an expensive luxury that undermines long-run development, is superfluous if one already works with the capability approach or the human rights tradition, or never has influence. Finally, it presents suggestions for how development ethics thinking can have increased impact, with reference to incorporation in policy analysis and planning methods, professional codes and training, and to its intellectual location and communication strategies. The field should articulate the methodological pragmatism which much of it has adopted, consistent with its required role as a practice-oriented interdisciplinary meeting ground. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/34851/ 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z 2015 marks the target year of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2000 along with the Millennium Declaration. Academic and political consultations are underway to review the current MDGs and to elaborate a developmental agenda beyond 2015. This includes MDG performance assessments, progress reviews and conceptual reflections (e.g. Fukuda-Parr 2012). In many countries progress towards the MDG targets, agreed in 2002, is not „on track‟, although this formulation may under-emphasise the progress made, especially in poorer countries which have had further to go to be on track (UN 2011; Advisory Council on International Affairs (AIV) 2011; Melamed 2012: 10–16).1 Within the current agenda this necessitates examination of the reasons for the areas of disappointing performance – most recently ascribed to the food and fuel crises and the financial crises and recession which have struck since 2008. It also requires intensified efforts to accelerate progress towards the deadline for as many targets and countries as feasible. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/39399/ 2011-12-01T00:00:00Z Mahbub ul Haq's work to coordinate, establish and propagate the human development approach offers an example of effective leadership in promoting more ethical socio-economic development. This article reviews Pioneering the Human Development Revolution-An Intellectual Biography of Mahbub ul Haq (edited by Haq and Ponzio), and extends themes from the United Nations Intellectual History Project to examine Haq's contributions in terms of four aspects of leadership: articulating and applying values that combine depth with broad appeal; providing a fruitful and vivid way of seeing, a 'vision', that reflects the values; embodying the values and vision in workable practical proposals; and supporting and communicating the previous aspects through wide and relevant networks. It suggests that the human development approach may need to update its values and vision, including through better integration of human security thinking, if it is to retain the leadership role it acquired thanks to Haq. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/26853/ 2011-11-01T00:00:00Z The Human Development Report 2007/8 (HDR) and the World Development Report 2010 (WDR) are both devoted to the connections between climate change and development. The reports provide very different perspectives on where the key challenges reside. Their policy proposals are also different, but much less so. The paper investigates these dissimilarities and similarities, and explores the framings in the Overviews of the two reports. It compares their conceptions of development, their normative content, the role given to human rights, and the status of proposed market solutions to issues of climate change and development. It ends by asking why, when the problem framings so significantly differ, the proposed solutions differed far less. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/33021/ 2011-06-01T00:00:00Z Driven by diverse forces – economic pressures and opportunities, climate change, war, conquest, and transformation of political regimes – human migration has been central to circulation of knowledge and values, goods and labour. Yet, it has been subject to mainly disciplinary inquiries and the existing body of studies has lacked a comprehensive perspective. This volume essays precisely such a more comprehensive historical and experiential perspective, and as a result leads us to reconsider the meanings of ‘human’, ‘movement’, and ‘borders’. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22692/ 2011-03-11T00:00:00Z Development is about people’s lives and their opportunities to use and enlarge their desirable human potentials. This article aims to switch the focus in design, implementation and evaluation of projects, from only an abstracted conception of ‘the project’ and the goods which it is meant to deliver, to a relevant conception of people as agents of change. Participation in a project leads to empowerment when people are self-motivated and involved in valued processes that achieve outcomes valued by them. The article proposes a ‘human autonomy effectiveness’ (HAE) criterion relevant for sustainable human development, that is built on a (relational) conception of autonomy and is relevant throughout the project cycle. Second, it develops an analytical approach to assess a project’s influences on human autonomy, by reference to changes in the determinants (agency powers, access to resources, and structural contexts) and to relevant decision-making during the project, and suggests how to operationalise this in the form of a practical assessment matrix. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/33020/ 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19843/ 2010-06-05T00:00:00Z The language of ‘human security’ arose in the 1990s, including from UN work on ‘human development’. What contributions can it make, if any, to the understanding and especially the valuation of and response to the impacts of climate change? How does it compare and relate to other languages used in describing the emergent crises and in seeking to guide response, including languages of ‘externalities’, public goods and incentives, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis? The paper examines in particular the formulations in those terms in Stiglitz’s Making Globalization Work and Stern’s The Economics of Climate Change and Blueprint for a Safer Planet, and how they are left groping for frameworks to motivate the changes required for global sustainability. It undertakes comparison also with the languages of human development and human rights, and suggests that, not least through enriching our skills of ‘narrative imagination’, the human security framework supports a series of essential changes in orientation—in our conceptions of selfhood, well-being and situatedness in Nature—and contributes towards a required greater solidarity and greater awareness of our inter-connectedness. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19777/ 2010-06-02T00:00:00Z Various studies suggest that major changes are required in predominant human values during the next two generations, to ensure politically and environmentally sustainable societies and a sustainable global order: away from consumerism to a focus on quality of life; away from a certain type of possessive individualism, towards more human solidarity; and away from an assumption of domination of nature, towards a greater ecological sensitivity. The paper reviews evidence on the scale of these challenges. Second, it analyses their implications and the possibilities of change at personal, societal and global levels, with special reference to education and the respective roles and mutual entanglement of personal change and system change. Thirdly, it discusses possible lessons and contributions of internationally oriented postgraduate education, drawing some suggestions from experience in the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22352/ 2010-06-01T00:00:00Z The concepts of well-being and quality of life concern evaluative judgements. There is insufficient understanding in current literature that these judgements aremadevariously due to the use of not only differing values and differing research instruments but also differing standpoints, differing purposes, and differing theoretical views and ontological presuppositions. The paper elucidates these sources of differences and how they underlie the wide diversity of current conceptions. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22353/ 2010-05-01T00:00:00Z We consider cross-border migration through the lens of the capabilities approach, with special reference to transnational migration and to implications for the approach itself. Cross-border migration has profound and diverse effects, not least because it accelerates change in the nature of political community. A capabilities approach can be helpful through its insistence on multi-dimensional, inter-personally disaggregated, reflective evaluation. At the same time, the realities of migration exercise pressure on capabilities thinking, to deepen its underlying social and political theory and nuance its efforts to counter communitarian tendencies. By extending its attention to migrants and the locality-spanning social and political spaces in which they live, the capabilities approach will be able to better concretize and situate the picture of the ‘we’ who ‘have (or seek) reason to value’ purported goods and rights. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19429/ 2010-03-01T00:00:00Z The 2008 World Migration Report from the International Organization for Migration is an enormous document that reflects efforts led by business sectors and some sections of governments in rich countries to move away from policy agendas overwhelmingly focused on restriction of international migration, towards a somewhat more open global economic order, and to build acceptance of substantial in-migration to match market demand. This paper illustrates use of methods of discourse analysis to identify the principles of selection, interpretation, prioritisation and argumentation that structure such a report. It gives particular attention to the Report’s choices and use of key terms, like ‘mobility’, ‘needs’ and ‘globalization’, and of key metaphors which guide the discussion, notably the metaphor of ‘flows’. Dominated by the mental models of neoclassical and neoliberal economics and the policy preoccupations of rich countries, the Report’s central claim is the “need” for international cooperation to match labour demand and supply within a global framework, as a concomitant of economic globalisation in other respects; and that this will support economic development worldwide. A human rights stance makes occasional appearances, represented by the term ‘human mobility’ rather than ‘labour mobility’ or ‘mobility for economic purposes’, but remains firmly subordinated. Migrants’ opinions and agency receive little attention; economic priorities based on market power dominate. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19430/ 2010-03-01T00:00:00Z The paper explores the proposed rationale of the Global Forum on Migration and Development that was launched by Kofi Annan in 2006 as UN Secretary General, as an informal inter-governmental discussion space. First, it identifies the series of claims in Annan’s speech to the High-Level Dialogue that he convened in New York: that international migration must be managed; that to proceed from the present situation of entrenched disagreements and mistrust requires constructive structured communication; that the Global Forum can provide this and is a feasible way forward, unlike proposals for binding international conventions; and that through processes of growing mutual education and mutual acceptance the Forum can be fruitful. Implied are notions of building trust and community amongst the “migro-crats”, the public policymakers in the global networks of migration. Second, the paper monitors how the hypotheses had fared by the time of the second Forum conference, in Manila in 2008, by discourse analysis of its concluding report. The Manila meeting’s declaration of a “focus on the person” appeared in reality to a large extent mean a focus on the “migro-crats” and their interactive processes of mutual education and team-building that are intended to produce practical cooperation. To clarify this strategy and draw out its mindset and assumptions, the paper presents a series of tools for discourse analysis that may be more widely useful in migration studies and for participation in migration policy debate. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19672/ 2010-02-01T00:00:00Z Social policy impact is partly determined by how policy is articulated and advocated, including which values are highlighted and how. We examine the influence of policy framing and reframing on outcomes, with particular reference to policies of the Delhi state government in India that target the practices of female feticide, infanticide and neglect that underlie the ‘daughter deficit’. Using Snow and Benford’s categories for understanding reframing processes, the paper outlines and applies a ‘model’ of reframing disputed issues, derived from looking at two famous campaigns – Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March in the struggle for Indian freedom from British rule and the African- American civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s. It argues that ‘carrot and stick’ policy measures, such as financial incentives and legal prohibitions, to counteract the ‘daughter deficit’ must be complemented by well crafted discursive interventions. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19675/ 2010-02-01T00:00:00Z We consider cross-border migration through the lens of the capabilities approach, with special reference to transnational migration and to implications for the approach itself. Cross-border migration has profound and diverse effects, not least because it accelerates change in the nature of political community. A capabilities approach can be helpful through its insistence on multi-dimensional, inter-personally disaggregated, reflective evaluation. At the same time, the realities of migration exercise pressure on capabilities thinking, to deepen its underlying social and political theory and nuance its efforts to counter communitarian tendencies. By extending its attention to migrants and the locality-spanning social and political spaces in which they live, the capabilities approach will be able to better concretize and situate the picture of the ‘we’ who ‘have (or seek) reason to value’ purported goods and rights. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17931/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z We need languages for transition; a human security framework adds value to languages of human rights, human development, and global public goods, through its emphases on interconnectedness and solidarity. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19885/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19889/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/21201/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z In this article, we describe and evaluate a teaching project embedded within a core policy analysis course that allows students to engage with a major public policy issue—in our case, environmental policy—without a corresponding cost in terms of reducing curricular space for developing general policy analysis skills. We think that a win-win arrangement is attainable: a fairly intense immersion into a key thematic area of public policy and a correspondingly more vivid, realistic, and integrated treatment of general policy analysis. The project has the potential to allow teachers and students to explore in depth and develop the skills and appreciation required for practice in any major policy area, even in tightly packed graduate policy programs. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22303/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Prelude: The surprising spread of ‘human security’ discourse Although the language of ̳human security‘ that became prominent in the 1990s has encountered criticism from many sides, it has continued to gain momentum. One encounters it frequently now in discussions of environment, migration, socioeconomic rights, culture, gender and more, not only of physical security. Werthes and Debiel propose that: ̳human security provides a powerful ―political leitmotif‖ for particular states and multilateral actors by fulfilling selected functions in the process of agenda-setting, decision-making and implementation‘ (2006:8). I suggest that in order to understand human security discourse and its spread this specification of actors and functions should be broadened. The relevant actors include more than states and multilateral agencies. What was primarily a language in United Nations circles is now far more. Like the sister idea of human rights, human security could be becoming an idiom that plays important roles in motivating and directing attention, and in problem recognition, diagnosis, evaluation and response. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22373/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Prelude: The surprising spread of ‘human security’ discourse The language of ‗human security‘ that became prominent in the 1990s has encountered criticism from many sides, it has continued to gain momentum. One encounters it frequently now in discussions of environment, migration, socioeconomic rights, culture, gender and more, not only of physical security. Werthes and Debiel propose that: ‗human security provides a powerful ―political leitmotif‖ for particular states and multilateral actors by fulfilling selected functions in the process of agenda-setting, decision-making and implementation‘ (2006:8). I suggest that in order to understand human security discourse and its spread this specification of actors and functions should be broadened. The relevant actors include more than states and multilateral agencies. What was primarily a language in United Nations circles is now far more. Like the sister idea of human rights, human security could be becoming an idiom that plays important roles in motivating and directing attention, and in problem recognition, diagnosis, evaluation and response. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22375/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Many analysts have described the current global economic crisis as being cataclysmic and unprecedented. Though the crisis originated with the sub-prime mortgages and risk hedging instruments in the financial sector of the United States, soon its effects have reached countries in Europe, Asia and Africa not to mention neighbours within Americas. As we write this editorial, violent protests in Greece and the loss of life of three bank workers exemplify how the tremors from the financial world translate into events with a true human cost. Many people, also in the global South have lost their jobs or fear to lose them if the economic situation does not improve. They, often the same ones, have lost their houses; others have lost their life-long savings. But this is not just an economic crisis; it is much more. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18710/ 2009-11-01T00:00:00Z The concepts of well-being and quality of life concern evaluative judgements. There is insufficient understanding in current literature that these judgements are made variously due to not only use of differing values and differing research instruments but also differing standpoints, differing purposes, and differing theoretical views and ontological presuppositions. The paper elucidates these sources of differences and how they underlie the wide diversity of current conceptions. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22350/ 2009-10-01T00:00:00Z Social policy impact is partly determined by how policy is articulated and advocated, including which values are highlighted and how. In this paper, we examine the influence of policy framing and reframing on outcomes, with particular reference to the policies of the Delhi state government in India that target the practices of female feticide, infanticide and neglect that underlie the ‘daughter deficit’. Using Snow and Benford’s categories for understanding reframing processes, the paper outlines and applies a ‘model’ of reframing disputed issues derived from looking at two famous campaigns – Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March in the struggle for Indian freedom from British rule and the African-American civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that ‘carrot and stick’ policy measures, such as financial incentives and legal prohibitions, to counteract the ‘daughter deficit’ must be complemented by well crafted discursive interventions. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18724/ 2009-03-01T00:00:00Z What interpretation of human flourishing, what ideas of value does capitalism in practice embody and promote? To address this question the paper clarifies first that ‘capitalism’ must be understood as more than merely a system of private property and markets. It contains ‘the prerogative of capital’, in which surplus remains with the owners of capital, and ‘the perspective of capital’, in which hired work is defined as a cost. The question must also be distinguished from more conventional ones (Does capitalism promote human flourishing? Is capitalism desirable? Is capitalism better than the alternatives?). Capitalism may not fit very well any of the standard conceptions of well-being, as pleasure or satisfaction or fulfilment of substantive needs. Its unending drives for expansion of the supply of commodities, and for their recurrent replacement, seem to fit more closely with an activist conception of well-being. The preoccupation with levels of monetized activity arises as an effect of capitalist categories of social accounting, fanned by competition, and how they can channel deeper human motives and pre-capitalist forces. However, while capitalism overemphasises activity (as monetized throughput), it undervalues work (as human self-expression) despite its centrality for felt well-being and physical and mental health and capability. The typical conception of work under capitalism is as a cost, for the capitalist must pay for it. The activist strand in capitalist practice and in corners of capitalist theory compensates to some extent for the automatic presumption that work is a cost, but in distorted, accidental and incomplete fashion. The paper concludes by asking how alternative conceptualizations of work might contribute to a more adequate treatment of human flourishing, and how we might draw implications from the well-being literature for reconceptualisation of work, reform of categories of societal accounting, and deepening of the research on ‘human development’. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17946/ 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z Cet article considère les concepts et les hypothèses sur lesquels repose la perspective politique développée par Amartya SEN. Il examine d’abord sa conception de, et sa préoccupation pour la liberté, ainsi que la priorité qu’il leur accorde. Il explore les fortes similitudes entre le travail de John Stuart MILL et celui de SEN. Il situe l’approche de la liberté de Sen en relation avec son idée de société et sa conception limitée de la communauté. En second lieu, nous comparons la valeur que SEN donne à la liberté avec sa réticence déclarée à spécifier les valeurs. Ce texte prolonge les arguments de DENEULIN sur l’insuffisance de la liberté par rapport à la théorie du Bien. Il suggère que le développement est une lutte collective pour l’extension des libertés bien raisonnées et des capabilités humaines, en équilibre avec d’autres valeurs raisonnées. Troisièmement, nous examinons le point de vue de SEN sur l’institutionnalisation de ses idées et suggérons que l’incomplétude de la liberté politique ouvre la voie à la promotion d’autres libertés humaines, particulièrement dans le contexte des forces du marché. Nous avons besoin de critères pour évaluer les processus et les résultats de la liberté politique, et de constitutions légales pour donner corps à des valeurs additionnelles au-delà de la liberté politique. Les idées de SEN requièrent une construction nécessairement conflictuelle de l’approche basée sur les droits afin de contrer la concentration toujours plus grande du pouvoir de l’argent. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17953/ 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z Terms like ‘human security’ try to catch the attention of an audience and to catch the user’s own attention; in other words they aim to stimulate and motivate. Having caught attention they try to organize it: they link to a perspective, a direction for and way of looking. Having caught and organized attention, they aspire to influence or even to organize activity: they provide frames for work. Such terms and the frameworks that they mark seem though to often come and quickly go, to rapidly rise and fall in international usage. A few terms become established but in the process often change or lose meaning. How important, persuasive and durable is a ‘human security’ framework likely to be? I will suggest, firstly, that a human security perspective promotes some necessary prerequisites for serious discussion of issues in global ethics. Prior to entry into any of the detailed debates in global ethics come a series of related choices about how we see ourselves and the world. First, how far do we see shared interests between people, thanks to a perception of causal interdependence, so that appeals to self-interest are also appeals to mutual interest. Second, how far do we value other people’s interests, so that appeals to sympathy can be influential due to interconnections in emotion. Third, how far do we see ourselves and others as members of a common humanity or as members of a national or other limited social community or as pure individuals: is our prime self-identification as interconnected or separate beings? This prior set of perspectives determines our response to proposed reasoning about ethics and justice. Adoption of a human security perspective can influence, even reconfigure, how we see ourselves and others and our interconnectedness, and thereby reconfigure how we think about both ethics and security. Secondly, with specific reference to issues of global climate change, I will suggest that the necessary transition in predominant societal perspectives and personal life-styles needs a language or languages of transition that make vivid and meaningful what is at stake, that unite and motivate groups committed to change, and that persuade enough of those groups who could otherwise block change. If we look at the value shifts identified as necessary by the Great Transition work we see that human rights language and the capability approach’s ‘development as freedom’ while potentially important are not sufficient. By themselves they are too potentially individualistic and compatible with visions of self-fulfilment through unlimited consumption and exploitation of nature. The emphases required—on human solidarity, stability and prioritization; prudence and enlightened self-interest; sources of richer quality of life, felt security and fulfilment; and ecological interconnection that demands careful stewardship—seem to be more fully present in human security thinking. It can be one of the languages of transition. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17954/ 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z Ethical discourses can have great influence in national and international affairs. Neta Crawford’s Argument and Change in World Politics (2002) reviews five centuries of debates over imperial conquest, slavery and the slave trade, forced labour, colonization, trusteeship and decolonization. Crawford shows how ethical discourses can gradually structure and restructure pre-analytical feelings and analytical attention and how they can interact with and influence other factors—by the range of comparisons that they make, by the categories and default cases that they introduce and defend, by the ways they reconstitute conceptions of ‘interests’ and perceptions of constraints. ... http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17957/ 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z ‘Human development’ language spread gradually in circles of national and international development policy and planning from the 1970s and acquired a definitive form in the 1990s in the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Reports (HDRs). Human development was defined as extension of people’s capability, the range of alternatives which they can attain and have reason to (favourably) value. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17959/ 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z The concepts of need and needs are pervasive in everyday discourse, public policy, especially social policy (see e.g. Witkin & Altschuld 1995, Brazelton & Greenspan 2000), management and marketing (see e.g. Jackson et al. 2004), and international policy areas such as humanitarian aid and the Millennium Development Goals. They have a long history in humanistic economics (Lutz & Lux 1988) and parts of welfare economics (e.g. Pigou 1920), even if sometimes different words were used (Amartya Sen, interviewed in Weiss et al., 2005: 240). Needs language essays some central functions – first, to make analyses of motivation richer and more realistic, extending our explanatory repertoire beyond ‘economic man’; second, to analyse instrumental roles and connections; and third to help structure and humanise policy prioritisation, and extend our evaluative repertoire beyond conventional economic measures such as per capita income. In all this, needs language attempts a communicative function too: to support the explanatory and normative work with frames that are simple enough yet robust enough to be usable, yet not too misleading, in routine professional and political discourse. Needs language is hard to order, because of how widespread and varied these roles are. Pervasive use has been frequently accompanied by casualness and obscurity. Added to currents opposed to any notion of publicly determined priorities rather than only market determined priorities, this has led to frequent opposition to the category of ‘needs’ in economics. Work in the past generation strengthened the structures of needs language, reinforcing it as a central medium in policy and administration and connecting it to the languages of human rights and well-being. This entry looks at the variety and nature of needs concepts, and at their relationship to research on human well-being and to ideas of human rights. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17963/ 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z Projects retain a crucial role in international aid. There are standard ways to evaluate them in terms of predefined objectives and the logic of connections for reaching those objectives. Projects typically face sustainability problems once the inducement of external resources is over, for their project logic is too narrow. In contrast, this paper proposes an interpretive analytical framework to assess project effects on human lives, in particular the effects on individual autonomy. It goes beyond looking at project outputs and short-run effectiveness in terms of project-specified objectives, and proposes a development effectiveness criterion that looks at whether and how projects positively influence individual autonomy: a human autonomy effectiveness criterion. The focus is on individuals as agents of change, and on individuals’ goals and values, rather than on projects as designed to directly produce other changes. The framework identifies relevant processes, practices and relationships during a project cycle. It aims at contributing to design, implementation and evaluation of aid projects so that participants are able to achieve valued goals, with greater chance of sustained positive effects. The paper is based on a completed study of four infrastructure projects in Nicaragua and El Salvador supported by the aid agency of Luxembourg, between 1999 and 2005. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17964/ 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z We have proposed elsewhere an alternative analytical framework for project evaluation and a criterion of ‘human autonomy effectiveness’ to examine the effects of aid projects on the lives, opportunities and capacities of participants (Muñiz Castillo & Gasper, 2009). A project is human-autonomy effective when it promotes an expansion of individual autonomy that allows people to support and sustain their own development, in a way that does not constrain other priority capabilities. In this paper, we explore how four aid projects influenced the autonomy of local participants, by examining their project logic. We elicit key assumptions behind the projects’ design and implementation; identify significant project practices (forms of interaction and practical strategies); and analyse the practices’ possible influence on the participants’ autonomy. The paper shows that we need to understand the project logic in a deeper way than through the conventional ‘logical framework’ approach. Power relations between project stakeholders are crucial elements of the actual practices that influence the access to resources as result of the projects. Moreover, practices such as top-down design or excessive conditionality could harm participants’ autonomy despite being supportive to other goals, and thus have negative longer-run significance. When project practices constrain the opportunities and perceived competence of individuals to help themselves, the ‘development’ or change promoted by those projects is not sustainable (Ellerman, 2006). http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/17973/ 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z ‘Development ethics’ can be seen as comparable to business ethics, medical ethics, environmental ethics and similar areas of practical ethics. Each area of practice generates ethical questions about priorities and procedures, rights and responsibilities. So, first of all, ‘development ethics’ can be seen as a field of attention, an agenda of questions about major value choices involved in processes of social and economic development. What is good or ‘real’ development? ... http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18730/ 2008-12-01T00:00:00Z Special arrangements were made by the European Union for decision-making on the possible accession of Romania and Bulgaria. A regime of extra procedures was added to the arrangements used for the Eastern European countries which joined the Union in 2004. This paper examines how the process worked out in the Romanian justice sector, which had been identified as a key area for reform to meet minimum EU requirements. We examine the discourses at policy and program levels and in three selected projects, including at design stage, interim report stage, and final report stage. Our discourse analysis of project documents pays special attention to the key structuring device used in the EU’s project and program planning: the ‘logical framework’ or ‘project matrix’. Intended as a key discipline on project design, implementation and evaluation, its inherent limitations and typical biases in usage can lead to major divergences between project and design. A technocratic language of planning can then in various ways serve as a cover that justifies whatever happened. We examine the language use and associated behaviour, as a contribution to the understanding both of Romanian accession in the face of sceptical European public opinion and of a methodology in worldwide use. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18731/ 2008-12-01T00:00:00Z Two authors who have been leaders of the ‘social quality approach’ that emerged in European social policy circles in the 1990s, and two authors who have worked with the ‘human development’ and ‘human security’ approaches that emerged in international development policy circles in the 1980s and 90s, collaborate in this paper in order to outline and compare the two traditions. The ‘human development’ tradition has focused on the quality of individual human lives, understood as influenced by interconnections that transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries; its ‘human security’ branch goes deeper into study of human vulnerability and the textures of daily life. The ‘social quality’ tradition tries to understand individual lives as lived within a societal fabric, to identify and measure key elements of that fabric, and to develop a correspondingly grounded public policy approach. The paper is a first step in a project to assess the possible complementarity, in theorising and practical application, of these two streams of work. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18734/ 2008-09-01T00:00:00Z Thinking about ethics of development and human development must both treat development in a global perspective and yet reflect on the content of human. This paper explores some faces of globalization by using a gender perspective, in order to consider reproduction (psychological and emotional as well as biological) and the activities and attitudes of care that give moral resources for response to systemic tragedy, not only for identifying and understanding it. There now exist globally interconnected systems of vulnerability and capability, for which matching systems of human security, care and responsibility are needed in order to protect human dignity. The discourse of human security helps here by better grounding an agenda of basic human needs, in an ethnography of ordinary lives rather than only an abstracted accounting of deficiencies or an elevated language of opportunities. It must be emotionally and existentially grounded too. The authors examine the potential contributions the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism; the work of philosopher-anthropologist Ananta Giri; and feminist care ethics. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18738/ 2008-02-01T00:00:00Z Denis Goulet (1931-2006) was a pioneer of human development theory and the main founder of work on “development ethics” as a self-conscious field that, by his definition, treats the ethical and value questions posed by development theory, planning, and practice. The paper looks at aspects of Goulet’s work in relation to four issues concerning the project of development ethics—[1] scope, [2] methodology, [3] roles, [4] organisational format and identity. It compares his views with subsequent trends in the field and suggests lessons for work on human development. [1] Goulet’s definition of the scope of development ethics remains serviceable and allows us to combine a view of it as social change ethics (including global change ethics) with yet a relatively specific primary audience of those who recognize themselves as working in development studies or development policy. [2] His approach in development ethics espoused intense existential immersion in each context and was often deeply illuminating, but was limited by the time and skills it requires and its relative disconnection from communicable theory. [3] Goulet wrote profoundly about ethics’ possible lines of influence, through prophetic force and more routinely through incorporation in methods, movements, and education. His own ideas did not become sufficiently embodied in methods and methodologies, but some have become so thanks to other authors. [4] Goulet saw development ethics as a new discipline or subdiscipline. However the required types of immersion, in particular contexts and/or in understanding and changing the methods and systems that structure routine practice, have to be undertaken by people coming from and remaining close to diverse disciplinary and professional backgrounds. Development ethics is and has to be, he gradually came to accept, not a distinct subdiscipline but an interdisciplinary field. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18743/ 2007-12-01T00:00:00Z Much of Amartya Sens work has been directly policy-related, but his methodology of policy analysis has not been explained in detail. Action-related social science involves value-imbued procedures that guide the numerous unavoidable choices. This theme was explored earlier by authors close to Sens milieu such as Streeten and Stretton, and by forerunners including Dewey and Myrdal. Assisted by Jean Drèze, Sen has evolved a form of policy analysis guided by humanist values rather than those of mainstream economics. 1) A wider range of values employed in how do and can people live? 2) Conceptual investigation of the wider range of values. 3) Use of the wider range of values to guide choice of topics and boundaries of analysis. 4) Hence a focus on human realities, not on an arbitrary slice of reality selected according to commercial significance and convenience for measurement. 5) Use of the wider range of values to guide other decisions in analysis; thus a focus on the socio-economic significance of results. 6) A matching focus on a wide range of potential policy means. The paper characterizes Sens policy analysis methodology, its roots in earlier work, and its relations to the UNDP Human Development approach and kindred approaches. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18749/ 2007-07-01T00:00:00Z Human rights, human development and human security form increasingly important, partly interconnected, partly competitive and misunderstood ethical and policy discourses. Each tries to humanize a pre-existing and unavoidable major discourse of everyday life, policy and politics; each has emerged within the United Nations world; each relies implicitly on a conceptualisation of human need; each has specific strengths. Yet mutual communication, understanding and co-operation are deficient, especially between human rights and the other discourses. The paper tries to identify respective strengths, weaknesses, and potential complementarity. It suggests that human security discourse may offer a working alliance between humanized discourses of rights, development and need. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18758/ 2007-01-01T00:00:00Z Leadership is a matter that social scientists often are ambivalent about, but is important in knife-edge’ situations and when people choose direction within wide-open possibilities. ‘Good leaders’ need contexts that stimulate and discipline them, good ‘followers’/ collaborators, and ability to use good luck. The paper explores the work of Mahbub ul Haq, in relation to some ideas about factors that affect initiatives for social justice through new ideas: a) lessons he learnt from the failure of his Basic Needs work at the World Bank (concerning lack of institutional protection; lack of a comprehensive vision; lack of a bridge to the mainstreams of economic policy and development policy); b) his operation as a wordsmith, providing appealing labels for big ideas, including an accessible value basis; c) his exemplification of two fundamental reorientations: ‘joined-up thinking’, analysis not restricted within the boxes of ‘national economies’; and ‘joined-up feeling’, global sympathy, concern and commitment; and d) a series of concrete, visionary proposals (like the Human Development indices, the 20/20 principle and the MDGs), which converted old talk about ‘progressive realization’ of economic and social rights into practical agendas and tools to try to keep leaders accountable. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19189/ 2006-07-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19187/ 2006-06-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19148/ 2004-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19141/ 2003-09-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19137/ 2003-07-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/21572/ 2003-07-01T00:00:00Z To what extent can Amartya Sen’s ideas on freedom, especially his conceptualization of development as freedom, enrich feminist economics? Sen’s notion of freedom (as the capability to achieve valued ends) has many attractions and provides important opportunities to analyze gender inequalities. At the same time, Sen’s recent emphasis on freedom as the dominant value in judging individual well-being and societal development also contains risks, not least for feminist analysis. We characterize the risks as an underelaboration and overextension of the concept of freedom. Drawing on Sen’s earlier work and various feminist theorists, we suggest instead a more emphatically pluralist characterization of capability, well-being, and value, highlighting the distinct and substantive aspects of freedom, as well as of values besides freedom, in the lives of women and men. We illustrate this with reference to women’s economic role as caregivers. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19123/ 2002-07-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/23177/ 2002-02-14T00:00:00Z Sen’s capability approach (SCA) has supported valuable work on Human Development (HD), bringing attention to a much wider range of information on people’s freedoms and well-being than in most earlier economic planning, but has troubling features and requires modification and enrichment. The paper first identifies the approach’s components, the contributions of the HD Reports, and the doubts whether SCA has sufficient conception of human personhood to sustain work on HD beyond finding indices superior to GDP. It then examines SCA’s central concepts. The concepts of capability and functioning lead us to consider both possibilities and outcomes, but their definition and use has been confusing. Besides Sen’s opportunity concept of ‘capability’ we must distinguish skills and potentials; and distinguish levels and types of ‘functioning’. To understand both consumerism and what can motivate and drive more humanly fulfilling development, we must elaborate different aspects and sources of ‘well-being’ and the content and requirements of ‘agency’, more than in Sen’s chosen strategy. SCA’s priority category of opportunity-capability must be read as a measure of personal advantage relevant in many public policy situations, rather than as a theory of well-being; and its concept of freedom must be partnered by concepts of reason and need. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19086/ 2001-07-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19078/ 2001-02-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19062/ 2000-05-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19045/ 1999-10-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19047/ 1999-10-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19048/ 1999-10-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19042/ 1999-09-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19007/ 1997-12-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19003/ 1997-11-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18952/ 1996-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18895/ 1995-04-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18848/ 1993-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18849/ 1993-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18937/ 1992-10-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18875/ 1991-08-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18813/ 1990-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18835/ 1990-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18929/ 1989-11-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18765/ 1989-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/34924/ 1975-09-01T00:00:00Z This paper looks at some of the structural aspects of the making of evaluations of policies in order to help explain some common features of evaluative discussion of public policy. What from one standpoint may seem to be a lack of an evaluative stance, a non-evaluation, may from another appear to be the very model of an evaluation. The results of an evaluation carried out according to one method may conflict hopelessly with those carried out by another. The results of evaluations by two different methods may be the same and yet unrecognized as such by any of the parties concerned; and so on. The main source of illustrations we have chosen is (part of) the debate in the last decade on the evaluation at a general level of rural cooperative policies in developing countries. We are inclined to say that discussion and evaluation of rural service cooperatives has been particularly subject to failure even to hear, let alone to understand, by some of those making contributions from different perspectives and premises. Our treatment of this cooperatives literature cannot be exhaustive. In any event its major purpose is to help present and develop some ideas of general interest and application, which do not stand or fall only insofar as applicable to cooperative studies. Debates about other policies and institutions, isms other than cooperativism, where they have already attracted complex evaluative (and non-evaluative) exchanges, are similarly subject to rev~ew according to the procedures of this paper. This is illustrated in a later section (Section 7) by a brief notice and analysis of an important debate on capitalism and imperialism. The theoretical ideas in this paper are themselves far from being a survey of, or a programme for, evaluation theory, or even for the comparative analysis of evaluation arguments. But by looking at some ways in which the different parts within alternative or conflicting approaches may be related or contrasted, both within approaches and between them, our aim is to contribute to establishing a realm of discourse in which comparisons between rural (and other) organizations and policies can be made that do not, whether wittingly or otherwise, just talk past each other.