The Human Development Approach within the UNDP: A Focus on Agency through theCapability Approach and Public Reasoning

Just after the publication of his seminal work on famines (Sen 1981) and while he was engaging in the analysis of gender inequality in India (Kynch and Sen 1983; Sen 1983a, 1984), Sen was invited to give the Presidential Address of the Development Studies Association in 1982.

Perhaps the most important thematic deficiency of traditional development eco­nomics is its concentration on national product, aggregate income and total supply of particular goods rather than on ‘entitlements’ of people and the ‘capabilities’ these entitlements generate. Ultimately, the process of economic development has to be concerned with what people can or cannot do, e.g. whether they can live long, escape avoidable morbidity, be well nourished, be able to read and write and communicate, take part in literary and scientific pursuits, and so forth. It has to do, in Marx’s words, with ‘replacing the domination of circumstances and chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances’. (Sen 1983b: 754)

This paper may be considered as the launching of a novel approach to development since it is the first time Sen defines development as the ‘expansion of people’s capabilities’ (Sen 1983b: 760). It may also be noticed that Sen’s quotation of Marx is a good definition of what Sen calls ‘agency’: ‘the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances’.

It is now well known that Mahbub ul Haq, a close friend of Sen, thought that his capability approach could be very relevant to ground the new development perspective of the United Nations.²⁶ Sen reported that, while Haq was working on the launching of a Human Development Report (HDR) for the UNDP, he called Sen who was in Finland to include him in the project: ‘he told me that I was too much into pure theory and I should drop all that now (“enough is enough”), and that he and I should work together on something with actual measurement, actual numbers, and try to make an impact on the world’ (Shaikh 2004). Haq’s ambition was to create a simple measure of social welfare, or human development, inspired by Sen’s theoretical insights.²⁷ Despite his scepti­cism about reducing his capability approach to a single number that would go beyond Gross National Product, Sen helped to develop the Human Development Index (HDI). Haq eventually convinced Sen that such an index would certainly be ‘just as vulgar as GDP, except it will stand for better things’ (UNDP 2010b: 2). Above all, Sen understood that ‘in order to communicate, you have to have the simplicity that GDP had’ (UNDP 2010b: 3). Indeed, for the twentieth-anniversary HDR edition, Helen Clark - the administrator of the UNDP - recalls that ‘[t]he premise of the HDI, considered radical at the time, was elegantly simple: national development should be measured not simply by national income, as had long been the practice, but also by life expectancy and literacy’ (UNDP 2010a: iv).

We should acknowledge though that the human development approach has also, and primarily, drawn a strong and direct influence from the basic needs approach, including non-material needs such as participatory

²⁶ In his autobiography, Sen (1999a) reports: ‘Mahbub insisted that I work with him to help develop a broader informational approach to the assessment of development.

²⁷ Sen reports that Haq kept quoting his 1985 book called Commodities and Capabilities:

It was kind of a formal lecture - a mathematical lecture. But Mahbub would comment on the fact that I made a big distinction between judging people and how their lives are going by looking at the commodity basket they own, as opposed to the freedoms and the capability they actually enjoyed. And Mahbub tried to tell me that this is the thing to do - and obviously you have done a few things, as he pointed out, but there are other things to do. (UNDP 2010b: 4) process and freedom (Hirai 2017: 18).^[167] But the definitive form of the human development approach, as it was launched in 1990 with the first HDR (UNDP 1990), is strongly in line with Sen's capability approach^[168] and his more general plea for people's agency: emphasizing the centrality of human initiative and creativity and the need to democratize the develop­ment process (Hirai 2017: 11). According to Desai, Sen's influence re­appeared in 1995 when the HDR put to the fore the theme of gender:

Here the agency theme is crucial and the human rights that women can exercise are an essential part of daily existence. Women need rights indoors to cope with domestic violence and intra-household inequalities.... Women's human develop­ment thus requires a broadening of the notion of freedom, and good nutrition or education presumed as given by the liberal notion of freedom become crucial. (Desai 2001: 221)

It also helped to undermine ‘the presumption - often implicitly made - that the issue of gender inequality does not apply to “Western” countries' (Sen 2009: 257). For instance, the 1995 HDR revealed that ‘Italy had one of the highest ratios of “unrecognized” labour by women (mostly unglamor- ous family work) among all the countries of the world included in the standard national accounts in the mid-1990s' (Sen 2009: 257).

In a sense, the human development index (UNDP 1990), and then the gender-related development index and the gender empowerment measure (UNDP 1995) are the translation of Sen's theoretical work influenced by his empirical results over a dozen years in terms which were to influence the largest number of policy-makers and opinion-formers. However, it is important to keep in mind that for Sen, this was just one application of his capability approach - which has its contextual relevance, but in no case the only possible implementation (Gilardone 2010: 22-3). The philosophy at the roots of the human development approach is somehow in this line. Indeed, the approach is characterized by a perpetual evolution, ‘to the extent that it places importance on public discussion and participation in the process of development' (Hirai 2017: 1). More precisely, decision­making through public discussion is a core message in the human devel­opment approach, aiming to submit the values involved in development explicitly to the public (Hirai 2017: 68). Sen keeps insisting on the idea that using any particular index always needs explicit formulation to facilitate

public scrutiny, criticism and correction (e.g. Sen 1997: 544, UNDP 2010a: vi). Even, at the beginning, Sen and Haq tried out different weighting systems to build the index - moving back and forth between theory and empirical results. They examined the results, keeping in mind their under­standing and knowledge of the countries, ‘to try to see to what extent it tallied with the kind of implicit wisdom that [they] had’ (UNDP 2010b: 2). Another persistent idea in Sen’s work is the following: it is important not to see the use of any framework for evaluation as an ‘all or nothing exercise’ (Sen 1992: 48). In other words, we need to leave room for ambiguities or incompleteness and we cannot expect a perfect evaluation of the develop­ment level, or the inequality level of a society. However, it can help to identify situations of patent injustice.

Last but not least, it is important to point out that, for Sen, providing indexes is not the only role of HDRs. While he is conscious that ‘an avalanche of tables (and a large set of related analyses)... lacks the handy usability of the crude GNP’ (UNDP 2010a: vi), he nonetheless highlights the essential role of the prose that HDRs contain, along with all the information displayed by many tables. Sen also insists upon one point very strongly: setting out indicators for everything that matters is not always relevant. For instance, he has refused to help Haq get a quantitative measure of human freedom, although freedom is the most important value in Sen’s work (UNDP 2010b: 4). It seems that Sen is very clear on the fact that obtaining indexes of political democracy and political freedom is not the right way to think about it and to promote such values. It does not mean that those critical issues for any development process should not be addressed in the reports, but ‘rather than trying to make nonsense out of numerical indicators and trying to put something which doesn’t fit there’, he considers it more relevant to ‘write about it’ (UNDP 2010b: 5). In other words, it would be a big mistake to reduce the human development approach to numbers like the HDI, and Sen reminds us that ‘[pe]ople have read prose for generations - they have read the epics, read poetry, read novels, read essays, to learn from each other’ (UNDP 2010b: 5). If we agree with Sen that the goal of all scientific analysis is to provide some constructive basis for ‘broader public exchanges, deliberations and in­formed agitations’ (Sen 2013 : 7),^[169] then we should not reduce the wealth of information about how human beings in each society live and what substantive freedoms they enjoy to pure numbers.

To summarize, we may say that Sen's role in the human development approach was motivated by three important aspects of his development studies: (1) the necessity for a wider informational basis on personal situations that may reveal unfair living conditions - relative to personal agency rather than purely material conditions or purely subjective condi­tions; (2) the necessity for an explicit formulation of the value judgements behind each evaluation done; and (3) the significance of public discussion in making evaluations evolve according to some shared values and defining policy strategy to improve the living conditions.

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