Mahbub ul Haq's work to coordinate, establish and propagate the human development approach offers an example of effective leadership in promoting more ethical socio-economic development. This article reviews Pioneering the Human Development Revolution—An Intellectual Biography of Mahbub ul Haq...

This paper reviews experience since governments first began, through the United Nations, setting time-bound quantitative goals to serve as guidelines and benchmarks for national and international action and development assistance. It argues that, contrary to much opinion, many of these goals...

The first and most prominent United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG-1) has been widely celebrated. Yet, four reflections should give us pause. Although retaining the idea of "halving extreme poverty by 2015", MDG-1 in fact sets a much less ambitious target than had been agreed to at the...

This article is situated at the intersection of the debates over the role of democracy in enhancing development and regarding human rights-based approaches to development. Decentralization acts as a lens through which the interaction of democratization, development, and human rights can be...

For their effective realization, human rights need to be perceived as culturally legitimate, and this in turn requires that they be justifiable pluralistically, engaging all reliable moral discourses. In so far as a human right calls for a specific capability to be respected, protected, and...

Capabilities are closely related to human rights. Capabilities are important human entitlements, inherent in the idea of basic social justice, and can be viewed as one species of a human rights approach. This paper explores this relationship, expanding on earlier publications, notably...

This paper analyses the role of finance and financial regulation in shaping capabilities, in the context of the 2008 financial crisis in the USA, paying particular attention to the implications for capability to be adequately housed. It argues that public reasoning and public action to safeguard...

Advocates or analysts of human rights and mainstream economists can find it difficult to communicate, let alone to arrive at agreement—when they communicate at all. Why is their dialogue non-existent or vexed? This paper identifies three deep-seated conceptual reasons. An improved dialogue can...

This article examines a new capability-based measurement framework that has been developed as a basis for equality and human rights monitoring in twenty-first-century Britain. We explore the conceptual foundations of the framework and demonstrate its practical application for the purposes of...

The objective of this article is to identify some key dimensions for a human rights-based approach (HRBA) in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) monitoring processes. We aim to highlight not only how this can bring human rights and the MDGs closer to each other, but also how it can...