Dennis Goulet

Abstract

The human development approach emerged in the late 1980s in response to the negative effects of structural adjustment programmes applied to countries in the South. Led originally by two South Asian scholars, Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, in cooperation with a large international network, the approach is comparative in perspective and global in reach and has been incorporated into parts of the United Nations (UN) system, including the United Nations Development Programme. Over the years this approach has integrated three dimensions – human development, human rights and human security –, and looks at people’s well-being or ill-being, security and insecurity, in the context of issues arising from global interconnectedness and inequities. It has had significant influence, but one constraint has been that its focus on the ‘human’ is accompanied by a widely recognised gap in respect of ‘the social’ (Apthorpe 1997, Gasper 2011, Phillips 2011). In this paper we emphasise the human security wing of the UN human development approach, for that provides the most opening from this family of ‘human’ discourses to issues of the ‘social’. Human security discourse looks at the human impacts of globalisation and the consequences of interrelated economic, socio-political, cultural and environmental change. Many international agencies, governments and social networks have taken up human security language. These include, besides UN agencies, the Human Security Network that includes Canada, Norway, The Netherlands, a dozen other countries and many NGOs; the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and development cooperation agency; the Thai government; and, to some extent, departments in charge of EU foreign policy.