What Development Means

The capability idea

The most useful modern account of development, and the one an examiner will recognise.

On this view, developed by Amartya Sen, what matters is not what a person owns but what a person is able to do and to be: to be adequately nourished, to be healthy, to be educated, to move about, to take part in the life of the community. Income matters because it is a means to those capabilities, and it is an imperfect means, because the same income buys different capabilities to different people in different places.

Two consequences for this paper.

Environment is a capability input. Clean water and breathable air are not luxuries a society buys once it is rich. They are among the conditions on which the ability to be healthy depends, and their destruction reduces development directly however much output rises.

The distribution question is not separable. If a factory raises the income of a district and poisons the well of one village in it, an average will show development and the capability account will not, because the people in that village can now do less than they could.

The right to development

The Declaration on the Right to Development 1986 is the instrument to cite, and MU has set "Right to development" as a short note twice.

Its article 1(1) provides that the right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.

Three features of that formulation are worth pulling out.

1. The right is to participate, to contribute and to enjoy. It is a right about the process as much as about the outcome, which is why consultation and consent are part of the modern law of a development project.
2. The holder is both the person and the people. It is individual and collective at once, which is unusual.
3. Development is defined by reference to human rights, being development in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized. On that definition a project that violates rights is not development, whatever it produces.

Rio Principle 3 carries the same idea into environmental law: the right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations.

Worked example

A thermal power station is proposed in a district with unreliable electricity. It will add capacity, employ several hundred people directly, and use the coal of a nearby field. It will take five hundred hectares, displace two villages, consume a quantity of river water that the downstream irrigators currently use, and emit particulates over a populated area.

On the growth measure the project is straightforwardly positive: output rises, employment rises, and the coal and the electricity both enter the national product.

On the capability measure the question is different and harder. Electricity widens what people can do: children study, clinics refrigerate vaccines, small enterprises run machines. Against that, the displaced households lose land, community and often occupation; the irrigators lose water, which is to say they lose the capability to grow what they grew; and the people under the plume lose health.

And the accounting point: the coal burnt is a stock consumed and appears as income, and nothing in the measure records that it is gone.

The legal expression of all this is the environmental impact assessment, the rehabilitation package and the public consultation, and each of them is an attempt to make the second measure operate where the first would otherwise decide.

What development does NOT mean

It does not mean industrialisation. Industrialisation is one route and it is not the only one, and treating the two as synonyms is what produces the assumption that environmental protection is anti-development.

It does not mean westernisation. The capability account is deliberately silent about what people should choose to do with their capabilities.

It is not automatically good. A project can raise output and reduce development. Saying so is not an anti-development position; it is the whole content of the phrase "sustainable development".

Distinctions that carry marks

Quick revision

• Growth is more output; development is a wider range of things people can do and be. Growth without development is possible, and so is the reverse.
• Development counts three things growth does not: distribution, non-market goods, and the depletion of stocks. The third is the accounting error at the centre of this paper.
• The capability account: income is a means, and environment is a direct input to the ability to be healthy.
• Declaration on the Right to Development 1986, article 1(1): an inalienable human right by which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to and enjoy development in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.
• Rio Principle 3: the right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations.
• Development is not industrialisation, not westernisation and not automatically good.

Test yourself

1. Give the difference between growth and development in one sentence, and then say why it matters to this paper.

Growth is an increase in the value of what an economy produces; development is a widening of what people are able to do and to be. It matters because a project that raises output while destroying the water or the air of the people around it registers as growth and may not be development at all, which is the proposition sustainable development rests on.

2. What is the accounting error at the centre of the environment and development problem?

That the national product records the sale of a natural stock as income and does not subtract the stock. A country that cuts its forests, exhausts its aquifer and sells its topsoil records all of it as growth, and nothing in the measure shows that it is poorer.

3. State article 1(1) of the Declaration on the Right to Development and identify its three notable features.

That the right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized. It is a right about process as well as outcome; it is held by the individual and by peoples at once; and it defines development by reference to human rights, so a project that violates rights is not development whatever it produces.

4. Why does the capability account make environment central rather than peripheral?

Because clean water and breathable air are conditions on which the ability to be healthy depends, so destroying them reduces what people can do directly. On that account environmental damage is not an externality subtracted from a benefit; it is a reduction in the very thing development is supposed to increase.