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by Séverine Deneulin 1

Abstract

Introduction

Current development thinking has been dominated by what can be called the ‘human development school’, widely popularised by the annual Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme. The conceptual roots of human development are to be found in the works of the economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. His book Development as Freedom has become a development bestseller. The book opens with the following sentence: ‘Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy’.2 Sen gives two reasons for viewing freedom as central to the process of development: first, there is an evaluative reason, for ‘assessment of progress has to be done primarily in terms of whether the freedoms that people have are enhanced’; second, there is the instrumental reason, for ‘achievement of development is thoroughly dependent on the free agency of people’.3

Despite the fact that Amartya Sen is an agnostic, and despite the fact that the human development paradigm has been shaped in purely secular circles, there are intriguing similarities between human development and Catholic Social Teaching. Furthermore, the human development paradigm discusses Catholic social themes in a more analytical and academically rigorous way, such as issues related to democracy and governance, trade and gender equality. What then is the contribution of an encyclical such as Populorum Progressio to today’s world? If everything has anyway already been said in the writings on human development, what is the need then to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Populorum Progressio as a great achievement?

This paper argues that the encyclical still contains significant insights for international development today. It is divided into three parts. First, it analyses the contribution of the human development approach to the central themes developed in Populorum Progressio. It especially focuses on the idea that integral human flourishing is the standard for assessing the progress of nations. It will also address the issues of governance, democracy building, the role of women and inter-generational justice, which secular works in human development have developed much further. However, Populorum Progressio is not as outdated as it first appears. The second part of the paper examines areas in which Populorum Progressio makes a unique contribution to development, despite having been written in a ‘pre-globalization age’. It emphasises the inter-connectedness of humankind, the universal destiny of goods, and the duties which follow from these. This is something the human development agenda has not been bold enough to say, and something that would be too far politically incorrect to say. Finally, the presentation concludes by exploring the possible mission of a Catholic development agency, and its originality from the work and mission of secular development agencies.

[1] Department for Economics and International Development, University of Bath. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This is a revised version of a talk given at the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (of England and Wales), in October 2005, in preparation of the 40th anniversary of the encyclical Populorum Progressio in 2007. I thank Daniel Groody and John Moffatt for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

[2] Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3.

[3] Ibid., p. 4.

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