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Nasir Khan, University of Auckland, New Zealand
smacks more of a temporary relief operation than a
permanent agenda for human development.
A Capabilities Approach Framework for Human
Development
A universally applicable global agenda like the MDG’s cannot
rule out some degree of inescapable generalization.
Operational precision, however, demands greater context
specificity. Global policy frameworks, therefore, need ample
dexterity to concur with different situations. Undoubtedly,
this is easier said than done. If we were dealing with a
mathematical progression, inference about the universe
could have been drawn from the constituent units by
studying various trajectories and averaging out the effect.
This would have been possible because all the constituents
would be operating in essentially the same frame of
reference. Unfortunately, such functional uniformity is not
always available when we are dealing with human
development. And this is where the inadequacy of the rates,
ratios, proportions and percentages becomes obvious.
In these circumstances the main issue in formulating an
alternative framework to the MDG’s is how to give it context
specificity and make it compatible with the assortment of
people’s diverse circumstances. Accordingly, the framework
laid down in the following lines targets this end as its
foremost focus. However, to give proper shape to this
framework, a set of ‘universally applicable capabilities’ is
first outlined on a parallel to the various goals of the MDG’s.
The operational framework of how to give context specificity
to these universally applicable capabilities is then explained
and in the end it is shown that how this framework carry
advantage over the MDG’s regime.
The spheres of human development targeted by the MDG’s
could be reclassified into food (the goals addressing acute
poverty and malnutrition), health (the goals related to
HIV/AIDS, maternal health and infant mortality) and
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