Justice-based Development

Abstract

When we use the concept of development descriptively, such as when we speak about how the previous month’s weather has developed, we tend to use terms like ‘transition’, ‘changeover’, ‘trend’, or ‘change’. These comments about development are descriptive, not evaluative. However, when we use the concept of development normatively, then we are making an evaluative statement that something has changed in a desirable or undesirable manner. For example, we may say that a company ‘made a significant development’ in order to express our positive assessment of the changes that it has undergone. In particular, when we talk in a normative sense about the development of a social arrangement, we usually refer to the idea of human or social progress (Lebret, 1960, p. 1, quoted in Goulet, 1995, p. 6; Chambers, 1997, p. vi; Dower, 2000, p. 44; Nuscheler, 2006, p. 225; Hopper, 2012, p. 3). For instance, the Human Development Report 2010 of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2010, p. 11) states explicitly that its approach to assessing development ‘is the best way of thinking about human progress’. Normative conceptions of the development of social arrangements thereby determine how one ought to conceive of human or social progress by arguing for a particular set of conditions whose fulfillment amounts to the realization of such progress.¹