Human Development

Human development is a normative evaluative approach to studies of development. Human development specifically focuses on achieving human flourishing, and it is different than other development approaches that focus on economic development. While economic development aims to achieve and sustain high rates of economic growth, human development seeks to expand the real freedoms of people in a society. Human development is therefore a people-centered approach, whereas economic development has an instrumental role as a means for improving people’s lives. Human development as a concept has been around for the last two and a half decades, influenced by the scholarly inquiry of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The approach has since been taken up by other development scholars and has been dispersed through institutions such as ...