Redefining Progress: Alternative Approaches to Development

For much of the 20th century, “development” had one dominant definition: economic growth. A country was progressing if its GDP was rising, its industries were expanding, and its infrastructure was being built. But by the 1970s, this model was under serious scrutiny. Millions of people living in high-growth economies were still going hungry, lacking access to clean water, and excluded from decision-making about their own lives. It became increasingly clear that GDP figures told only part of the story – and often the wrong part. What emerged in response was a richer, more human-centred understanding of development – one that measured progress by what people could do, be, and become, not just by what their governments could produce.

Why mainstream development models fell short 🔗

The dominant post-World War II approach to development was rooted in modernization theory, which assumed that economic growth would naturally trickle down and improve living standards for everyone. Poverty, it was thought, would be resolved through industrialization, technology transfer, and integrating developing countries into global markets. This top-down model had serious blind spots: it overlooked inequality, ignored local cultures and conditions, and treated development as a one-size-fits-all template to be imported from the industrialized West.

Critics – especially from the Global South – pushed back. They argued that development had to be rethought from the ground up, placing people, their needs, and their rights at the centre. This led to several alternative frameworks that continue to shape development policy and practice today.

The basic needs approach 🔗

The most foundational shift came with the Basic Needs Approach (BNA), formally introduced by the International Labour Organization (ILO) at its World Employment Conference in 1976. The approach was straightforward in principle: before anything else, development must prioritize satisfying the fundamental requirements of human life.

As defined by economist Frances Stewart, basic needs always include meeting minimum nutritional standards (food and clean water) and the universal provision of health and education services. They can also extend to shelter, clothing, employment, and non-material needs like political participation. The 1995 World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen reinforced this thinking, calling on all nations to develop measures of absolute poverty and gear national policies toward eradicating it.

The BNA was a direct challenge to GDP-centric models. A country could post impressive growth numbers while large sections of its population lacked safe drinking water or had no access to schools. The basic needs framework insisted that these failures were not side effects to be fixed later – they were the central problem that development should address first. It also laid the groundwork for later human development indices, including the UNDP’s Human Development Index, which continues to measure progress across health, education, and income today.

Another development: rethinking the entire paradigm 🔗

By the mid-1970s, some scholars and activists were arguing that tinkering with existing development models was not enough. What was needed was an entirely different paradigm. This gave rise to what became known as “Another Development”, a concept articulated most influentially by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in its landmark 1975 report What Now?

Another Development challenged the Western-centric assumption that all societies must follow the same industrialization path. It argued that true development had to be need-oriented (focused on human well-being, not productivity), endogenous (driven by a society’s own values, resources, and culture), self-reliant (not dependent on external aid or foreign capital), and ecologically sustainable (conscious of natural limits).

Critically, it was also a critique of dependency. Post-colonial nations were not simply “behind” the West on a linear development track – they were often actively underdeveloped by an unequal global economic order. Another Development insisted that communities and nations had the right to define their own paths to a good society, rather than following a universal template set by international institutions or donor countries. This approach has been particularly influential in discussions about sustainable development and continues to resonate in debates around the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The participatory approach: communities as architects of change 🔗

Even the most well-designed development programmes have failed when they were imposed on communities without their input. This recognition is at the heart of the Participatory Approach, which holds that the people most affected by development decisions must be actively involved in making them.

Interest in participatory methods grew significantly from the early 1970s onward, gaining support from both national governments and international development agencies across ideological lines. The approach draws heavily on Paulo Freire’s idea of conscientization – the process by which people develop a critical awareness of their social reality and take action to transform it.

In practice, this involves tools like Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Participatory Action Research (PAR), which help communities map their own resources, identify their own priorities, and co-design solutions with outside agencies. Rather than arriving with predetermined answers, development workers become facilitators of community-led inquiry.

The participatory approach has several practical strengths. Solutions developed with local communities are more likely to be contextually appropriate, culturally accepted, and sustained long after external agencies leave. It also ensures that the voices of marginalized groups – women, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities – are included in processes that directly affect their lives. The approach has been widely adopted by organizations including the World Bank and numerous UN agencies as a core element of community-driven development.

Amartya Sen’s capability approach: development as freedom 🔗

Perhaps the most intellectually influential rethinking of development in the 20th century came from Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. In his landmark 1999 work Development as Freedom, Sen argued that development should be understood as the expansion of human capabilities – what people are actually able to do and be – rather than the accumulation of wealth or commodities.

The Capability Approach rests on two central concepts. Functionings are the actual states and activities that constitute a person’s life – being well-nourished, being educated, participating in community life, living without fear. Capabilities are the real, substantive freedoms people have to achieve those functionings – not just formal rights on paper, but genuine opportunities in practice. As the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative explains, Sen challenged economists to move beyond income and resources to measure valuable human functionings like the ability to move around freely or live a long and healthy life.

Sen’s approach introduced a crucial distinction that mainstream economics had ignored: two people with the same income or resources may have very different capabilities, due to disability, gender discrimination, social exclusion, or other factors. A pregnant woman and a sedentary office worker require very different nutritional inputs to achieve the same health outcomes, for instance. Evaluating development by income alone obscures these differences entirely.

Functionings, freedom, and human agency 🔗

Sen also identified a concept he called adaptive preferences – the tendency of people living in deprivation to adjust their desires downward as a coping mechanism. Someone who has never had access to healthcare may not express a desire for it, even though its absence represents a serious capability failure. This is why subjective well-being surveys alone are not reliable indicators of development. The capability approach insists that evaluation must consider what people have genuine reason to value, not just what they currently say they want.

Sen’s framework directly influenced the design of the Human Development Index (HDI), developed alongside economist Mahbub ul Haq for the UNDP’s first Human Development Report in 1990. The HDI moved beyond GDP to incorporate life expectancy and education as key dimensions of human progress – a direct expression of Sen’s capability logic.

The rights-based approach: development as entitlement 🔗

Building on the foundations of participatory development and the capability approach, the Rights-Based Approach (RBA) to development offers a third reorientation: it reframes development not as charity or technical assistance, but as a legal and moral obligation rooted in human rights.

Recognition of human rights as the ground rules for development programming gained formal momentum after the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. According to UNDP’s capacity development framework, a human rights-based approach identifies rights-holders (individuals and groups with legitimate entitlements) and duty-bearers (states and institutions with corresponding obligations), and works to strengthen the capacity of each. Development programmes under this approach must further the realisation of rights as laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international instruments.

This reframing has significant practical implications. If access to food, education, or clean water is a right, then failing to provide them is not merely an unfortunate gap – it is a violation of an obligation. Governments are accountable not just to donors or performance metrics, but to the people whose rights they are bound to fulfill. It shifts the relationship between development agencies and communities from one of benefactor and recipient to one of accountability and redress.

HRBA in practice 🔗

The rights-based approach also insists on non-discrimination, participation, and transparency in development processes. It has been applied in areas ranging from water access to gender equality to food security. UNDP’s HRBA Toolkit integrates human rights principles directly into sustainable development programming, providing governments and civil society organizations with tools to embed accountability into every phase of project design and implementation. The approach is explicitly intersectional – it recognizes that poverty, exclusion, and rights violations are interconnected, and that development interventions must address power imbalances, not just service gaps.

How these approaches connect 🔗

What unites all five frameworks is a rejection of the idea that more economic output automatically means better lives. Each approach shifts the question from “how much is being produced?” to “who is benefiting, how, and on whose terms?”

The Basic Needs Approach set the minimum floor – no development is meaningful if people are starving or sick. Another Development challenged the direction of travel itself – whose values and whose vision of a good society should guide development? The Participatory Approach insisted on process – the how matters as much as the what. Sen’s Capability Approach provided philosophical depth – development means expanding what people can genuinely do and be. And the Rights-Based Approach locked in accountability – development is not a favour but a binding obligation.

Together, these frameworks represent a cumulative reorientation in how development is understood. Their influence is visible in the structure of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which explicitly address poverty, inequality, health, education, gender equality, and environmental sustainability as interconnected dimensions of human progress – not as separate afterthoughts to economic growth.

What do you think? If development is truly about expanding what people can do and be – not just raising income levels – how should governments decide which capabilities to prioritize when resources are limited? And can a single global development framework ever genuinely respect the diversity of what different communities value in a good life?

References

1. https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/history/lang–en/index.htm
2. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-17731-8_1
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_needs
4. https://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi
5. https://www.daghammarskjold.se/
6. https://sdgs.un.org/goals
7. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-11415-3_7
8. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/communitydrivendevelopment
9. https://iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/
10. https://ophi.org.uk/research/amartya-sen-and-ophi
11. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/
12. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/publications/Human-Rights.pdf
13. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
14. https://www.undp.org/publications/human-rights-based-approach-development-programming-hrba-toolkit