UN Human Development Report presentation
Below is the text of the comments I made at the book launch for the UNDP's 2011 Human Development Report on sustainability and equity. I prepared my remarks expecting primarily an audience of students. Instead, I offered them to an audience in which the 30-odd ambassadors to Korea probably outnumbered the students. I'm sure it's not what they were expecting!
Practically Useless:
The 2011 UNDP Human Development Report
Good afternoon, Your Excellencies, Ms. Degryse-Blateau, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. It is a genuine honor to have this opportunity to speak with you today about the 2011 Human Development Report, Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All. This is not just because a good friend of mine worked on the report in New York City and not only because I am a strong supporter of the capabilities approach but also because sustainability and equity are two areas of vital concern to me and bringing the two together is an important undertaking.
This is my first time speaking before such a dignified audience, so I hope that my reflections on the report are not inappropriate. If they are, I hope they will at least be thought-provoking, as that is one role an academic can play.
The 2011 Human Development Report, like the Human Development Index, is practically useless. I mean this in two senses. First, the Report is almost useless and, second, its uselessness serves a most practical and important use. Let me explain by starting with the Human Development Index.
As we saw in the introductory presentation, the HDI is composed of merely four variables: life expectancy, mean years of schooling, expected years of schooling, and per capita income. Surely, if we care about what is happening on the ground, as policy makers and academics, we can make the extra effort to deepen our understanding by looking at four variables. Of course, even these four variables themselves do not really tell us what we really want to know. They do not tell what kind of lives people lead. They do not tell us what kind of education people are getting. They do not tell us how a nation's GDP is distributed among its population. Of course, these variables are correlated with aspects of people's lives that we care about, but in themselves they do not really tell us much. Compiling them into a single indicator only exacerbates the problem.
However, Martha Nussbaum, one of the main developers of the human development approach, points out that the purpose of the HDI is not practical application. Rather the HDI was originally developed for ``strategic'' purposes by Mahbub ul Haq to act as a counter to the prevailing reliance on per capita income alone as a measure of development. The juxtaposition of the two numbers and the rise and fall of nations in the overall rankings were intended to draw attention to the underlying indicators and others related to them. Thus, the HDI is designed to encourage us in to more closely inspect people's real living conditions (Nussbaum, 2011, 59-60). In this light, the Gender Inequality Index and the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index are useful steps forward, but they, too, are only truly useful to the extent that they induce further investigation.
And I think the 2011 Report functions in effectively the same way as the Human Development Index. The broad trends illustrated in the Report and depicted in the introductory presentation are alarming, but they are so general that there is little use to be derived from them in addressing the concrete issues facing individual nations and regions. But they are so disturbing that they should spur us into action. And they should spur us into looking more deeply at specific challenges facing communities. The Report, I think, recognizes the importance of this in its emphasis on microclimates and geographical differentiation and its insistent calls for localized analysis and policies. The practical and useful role the 2011 Report should play is to encourage each of us to look more closely at the complexity with which sustainability and equity interact in localized contexts. For example, the Report effectively points out that access to cooking fuel is connected both to the sustainability of local environments and to the time budgets of women, but it also recognizes that fuel sources vary by locality and thus policies have to differentiate as well.
As one broader example of how we might push beyond the superficial and disturbing content of the Report, I will share one implication--and I believe, a rather controversial implication--of the Report, namely, that it highlights the vital role of social movements and endorses social protest.
The Report defines sustainable human development as ``the expansion of the substantive freedoms of people today while making reasonable efforts to avoid seriously compromising those of future generations'' (United Nations Development Programme, 2011, 2, emphasis added). For me the most suspect phrase in this definition is ``reasonable efforts''. Are these efforts reasonable from the perspective of the agricultural commodities futures broker on Wall Street who is concerned about getting her child into the same prestigious university she attended? Or are they reasonable from the perspective of a Bangladeshi farmer whose land is threatened by rising sea levels and who is concerned with getting his children sufficient nutrition so that they are able to study at all? ``Reasonable efforts'' surely represents language selected to avoid or at least delay dispute, but it is also consistent with the broader concerns of the human development approach.
The Report described the human development approach as rooted ``in inclusion, participation and reasoned public debate, while recognizing diverse values, conditions, and objectives'' (United Nations Development Programme, 2011, 88). This is effectively a definition of a robust form of democracy: deliberative democracy. In this form of democracy, which was developed initially by Habermas, open public debate that relies on a careful, rational evaluation of diverse and often conflicting interests, values, conditions, and objectives leads to a transformation of those very interests and values. The end goal is not just the type of win-win-win solution that the Report emphasized but also a growing alignment of individual interests with the public interest. In the context of the Report, this would mean greater sustainability and equity.
However, while the UNDP should be commended for supporting such a robust democratic ideal--one that is surely in keeping with the human development approach--we must bear in mind that it is an ideal. Research in my field, urban planning, which has actively explored deliberative democracy, indicates that this ideal remains an empty hope if powerful interests refuse to be inclusive and recognize other values. In such contexts, marginalized groups must adopt alternative and often more conflictual approaches to ensure that their interests and values are properly considered.
I would suggest that the authors of the 2011 Report consider the contemporary challenge of attaining sustainability and equity to be one of those contexts. The Report recognizes that economic interests are unlikely to participate enthusiastically in many of the proposed solutions, which threaten the profitability of many business activities. For example, the rather sound call for a broad international financial transactions tax threatens the free mobility of capital and is likely to be actively opposed by financial interests. Indeed, the Report goes so far as to say that ``powerful economic interests and lobbies'' often exercise ``disproportionate influence'' on the decisions of policy-makers (United Nations Development Programme, 2011, 66).
In response, the Report calls on civil society to develop a ``countervailing power'' to promote equity and sustainability. Though the Report does not explicitly state its support for social protest, there are clear indications that social movements must often challenge the established system to attain them. The Report repeats its claim that the Arab Spring represents one of the most significant leaps forward in human development during 2011. And we know that these protests were extralegal challenges to existing regimes. Of course, the occasional necessity of extralegal opposition should come as no surprise. Anyone remotely familiar with the history of struggle for justice is aware that those benefiting from current social arrangements seldom willingly extend rights and liberties that undermine their position. Though we could go back at least as far as the American and French Revolutions, more recent history also supports this case. Indeed, Korea's own recent history provides direct evidence. More directly pertinent to the Report itself is that the environmental movement that originally put sustainability on the political agenda has been forced to rely on extralegal protest from its beginning.
So, if a healthy environment is a human right, as the Report suggests (United Nations Development Programme, 2011, 86), and governments fail to engage in more robust and inclusive forms of democracy, social movements conscious of the inequitable impact of climate change and pollution will have to fight for that right and social unrest will increase. To achieve the Report's goals, civil society and social protest will have to be more active in developed countries than in developing countries. There are two reasons for this. First, these countries are exporting their pollution-generating activities to developing countries and those most affected by this pollution lack representation in the developed countries. Second, it is in developed countries that opposition to the financial transactions tax will be strongest, since they tend to have larger currency transactions (United Nations Development Programme, 2011, 95).
In conclusion, I have argued that the 2011 Human Development Report is practically useless. That is, there is little to gain by treating its findings as directly applicable. Rather, the Report's important and practical use is to spur further inquiry into the concrete and contextualized local situations being faced by individuals. In addition, in keeping with the fundamental principles underlying the human development approach, the Report implicitly and correctly calls for the expansion of deliberative democratic processes as a core component of achieving sustainability and equity.
