Are the concepts of human rights and human development similar enough to be complementary? Are they diverse enough to enrich each other? Amartya Sen answers these questions, arguing that human rights and development are indeed mutually compatible. He shows that the promotion of human development and the fulfilment of human rights share a common motivation: enriching the lives and freedoms of ordinary people. The combination of the two perspectives gives us something that neither can provide alone.
Human rights focuses on individuals, and their claims to secure capabilities and freedoms. Capabilities are the range of things a person can do and be in leading a life. Human development focuses on the enhancement of the capabilities and freedoms that the members of a community enjoy. Both are concerned with economic, social and cultural rights and freedoms as much as with civil and political rights and freedoms. Based on examples from girls’ education, to women’s rights and the East Asian crisis, the different bodies of theory can be seen to complement each other.
Key perspectives offered by the human rights approach include:
- A focus on duties, linking the human development approach to the idea that others have duties to facilitate and enhance human development. This also entails looking at accountability, culpability and responsibility.
- Concern for how the outcomes of human development are achieved. This protects individuals and minorities from policies that might benefit the community as a whole but places huge burdens on them. It also focuses on the conduct of public officials and the institutional structure within a society.
- Attention not only to progress so far but to potential threats to progress.
Key perspectives offered by the human development approach include:
- A practical means of measuring achievements, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and a way to prioritise the securing of different rights where there is a scarcity of resources.
- An emphasis on the enabling environment for the fulfilment of individual rights, including institutional complementarity, resource constraints and the need for public action to address them.
- A dynamism and focus on change and progress that human rights approaches may lack.
Therefore, for development to be achieved, the different focuses and analyses involved in a human rights and a human development approach must be pursued simultaneously. Further observations include:
- Human rights must not be confined to legal rights. They include moral claims on the behaviour of individual and collective agents, and on the design of social arrangements. These may not correspond to a legal framework.
- While rights importantly entail duties, rights must still exist even where no exact duties are imposed on specified persons or agents to fulfil them. The means to achieve them may not always be present, but by expressing the right, support for it can be mobilised.
- Where resources to fulfil all rights are not available, governments should be encouraged to work towards making their fulfilment feasible. The extent of progress in this area should be praised, focussing attention on these rights, as well as the processes that lead to human development.
