ABSTRACT
International development institutions have long since adopted approaches that facilitate development beyond a poverty-reduction agenda. The United Nation's ‘Declaration on the Right to Development’ (1986) and the UNDP stress that all peoples should be able to live under conditions that allow them to pursue their well-being. Whereas poverty reduction is part of that equation, so are the social and institutional processes that promote agency, formal and informal education, capabilities, intuitive dignities, innovation and cultural expression. The well-being perspective runs counter to a focus on poverty defined in terms of ‘lack of income’ and points to the interlocking effects of institutions on quality of life and satisfactions, and vice versa. In the early 1990s the UN, under the guidance of Mahbub ul Haq and his team of colleagues, including among others Amartya Sen, 1 designed the Human Development Index (HDI)—a composite index of national averages of education, life expectation and income level. The HDI in turn was inspired by the basic needs index of Peter Townsend (1979), as well as the capabilities approach by Amartya Sen (1985). The HDI did not cover all dimensions of well-being but was considered the best possible construct at the time, particularly because the type and quality of data were not suf-ficient, especially in developing countries.
