Who Holds the Keys to Development? From Economic Catch-Up to Human Developmental State

This article highlights the concept of human rights within the general model of the Developmental State (DS) approached from a political and economic perspective. The study reveals the conceptual inadequacy of the old model of DS in developing and enhancing the implementation of human rights and, in particular, emphasizes those rights commonly falling in the category of human rights unconnected to merit goods and associated with the integral approach to human development. In this sense, the research findings of this study are both in contrast with the destruction of institutional capacity to pursue developmental goals under the contradictory view of mainstream economics and inconsistent with the adverse criticism to human rights policies aimed at strengthening a transition to democracy and inducing structural rearrangements within the old model of DS. For this reason, we address some key issues confirming the economic and political feasibility of such human rights policies since the integral achievement of human rights moves the new model of DS significantly in the direction of dealing with regional and global dimensions, in order to realize the passage from “freedom of” to “freedom from”. The main aim of this article is to contribute to the epistemological and methodological analysis of developmental state and to investigate how an integral human development approach can not only distinguish the researcher's experience as meaningful within the context of development studies, but also how such an approach can be useful to engage with particular social and cultural facets, namely the insights of human rights in the socio-economic policymaking process. The latter remains an area of research which, despite the negligible results achieved by the mainstream Neoclassical view on policymaking in the developing world and the heterodox extensive research undertaken, still remains conceptually under-theorized