Defining and Measuring Human Development: A Genealogical Analysis of the UNDP’s Human Development Reports

Juan Telleria ()
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Juan Telleria: University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

The European Journal of Development Research, 2023, vol. 35, issue 3, No 3, 520-544

Abstract: Abstract In the early 1990s, the UNDP’s human development approach became very influential in international development debates. Since then, the UNDP publishes yearly global Human Development Reports, where the Human Development Index of every country is listed and ranked. This article conducts a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of the UNDP’s understanding of human beings and development and finds two noteworthy aspects. Firstly, the calculation and publication of the Human Development Index reproduce the power–knowledge technique Foucault called ‘the examination’. Secondly, the UNDP implicitly reproduces the anthropological assumptions of nineteenth-century British Victorian evolutionist sociology. In this way, the article exposes the implicit power dynamics that the Human Development Reports of the UNDP subtly reproduce. The article concludes that the UNDP approaches complex twenty-first-century global issues relying on nineteenth-century theoretical assumptions and power techniques.

Keywords: UNDP; Human development; Foucault; Geertz; Quantitative; Human Development Index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1057/s41287-022-00516-2

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