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...

The two concepts — human rights and capabilities — go well with each other, so long as we do not try to subsume either concept entirely within the territory of the other. There are many human rights that can be seen as rights to particular capabilities. However, human rights to important...

The present paper contributes to operationalizing the Capability Approach by proposing a methodology for the design of sets of indicators for monitoring inequality among social groups based on census and household surveys. The result is a set of indicators and synthetic indices that can be...

The label 'human security' has attracted much attention since the 1994 Human Development Report, but there are numerous conflicting definitions and agendas, and widespread scepticism. The Ogata-Sen Commission report Human Security Now has proposed a unified yet flexible definition and agenda....