1 The Basic Needs Approach The best shorthand way of describing basic needs is:

Box 3.1 The Basic Needs Approach The best shorthand way of describing basic needs is:

incomes + public services + participation. The basic needs approach is a reminder that the objective of development is to provide all human beings with the opportunity for a full life. It goes behind abstractions such as money, income or employment. These aggregates have their place and function but … are useless if they conceal the specific, concrete objectives that people themselves seek. It appeals to members of national and international aid-giving institutions and is therefore capable of mobilizing resources, unlike vaguer (although important) objectives, such as raising growth rates to 6 per cent, contributing 0.7 per cent of GNP to develop- ment assistance, redistributing for greater equality or narrowing income gaps.

As the basic needs concept entered the North–South dialogue, all sorts of miscon- ceptions and misinterpretations grew around it. First, it was said that basic needs are confined to basic commodity bundles. Second, it was the thought that the role allotted to the state was too powerful, both in determining what basic needs are and in providing for them being met, and that this type of paternalism (was) both inefficient and unworthy. Third, it was held that there was a neglect of opening up opportunities to people: access to jobs, income, assets, credit (and) power (was) neglected in favour of so many calories, so many yards of cloth.

During the 1980s, and while stabilization and adjustment policies were pursued, new concerns were incorporated (into) the development dialogue: the role of women (and children), the physical environment, population, habitation, human rights, political freedom and governance, empowerment [and] corruption. The basic needs approach was regarded as too narrowly focused on commodity bundles delivered to people by the government, and it had to carry the ballast of past misinterpretations.

Extracts from Paul Streeten (2003) ‘Shifting fashions in development dialogue’, in S. Fukuda-Parr and S. K. Kumar, Readings in Human Development, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp72–75.

IDEAS RELATED TO HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

It was only in the early 1990s that the essential ideas behind the basic needs approach – that providing the ideal conditions for a full human life require a multi-dimensional and non-monetary conception of well-being, which should

be the ultimate goal of development – was reintroduced to the public policy arena. Amartya Sen’s groundbreaking theoretical work on equality and poverty measurement, welfare economics and social choice theory 5 – with Mahbub ul Haq playing the critical role of translating these ideas into practicable policy through the creation of the Human Development Report and the Human Development Index in 1990 (Fukuda-Parr and Kumar, 2003) – firmly established the importance of the human development and capability approach in policy and development circles.

The human development approach offers three additional dimensions to basic needs: first, it is based on a much stronger philosophical foundation, thanks to Sen’s pioneering work in welfare economics and social choice, which questioned utility as the primary marker for judging states of affairs. Second, it blurs the distinction between developed and developing countries. It is a framework as relevant for assessing the quality of life of people in the US as it is for, say, Sierra Leone, while basic needs had little application in industrialized countries. Finally, human development places a greater emphasis on human freedom and participation (although the latter was initially a feature of the ILO’s basic needs approach, it eventually became less of a priority).