Advancing Human Development: Values, Groups, Power and Conflict

Abstract

In one of my first doctoral supervision meetings with Frances Stewart, I found a recurring comment pencilled throughout my abstract philosophical discussions on the capability approach: ‘What does this mean for the real world?’ During subsequent doctoral supervisions, she often emphasised three points. First, humans are not free individual agents who decide and act on the basis of their own reasoning. They are profoundly social and embedded into layers of complex social relationships. Human actions are never disconnected from the wider networks of social relations and institutions in which people are historically situated. In other words, human existence entails belonging, and this provides the condition for the exercise of freedom and agency. Another point that she was always quick to make was that policy decisions were the result of differences in power between groups, whether political parties, social movements, international organisations, civil society organisations, global corporations, companies or business associations. One final point that she emphasised, linked to the latter, was conflict. When one makes an individual decision about one’s life, there are often conflicting claims, which are equally valuable. This is even more so when collective decisions are made. Collective decision-making is fraught with conflict which cannot always be resolved in a straightforward way, through reasoning.