Basic Needs Strategies, Human Rights, and the Right to Development

The failure of the economic and social system to achieve a basic minimum condition of life for hundreds of millions of people in the third world has led to widespread recognition of the need to give primacy to securing universal access to basic social and economic goods and services. This recognition has been shared by economists, philosophers, and advocates of international human rights, but each have proceeded separately to develop conceptual frameworks and policy mechanisms to achieve the same or similar goals. In the latter part of the 1970s, development economists adopted a ‘basic needs’ (BN) approach to development, largely as a response to the failure of economic growth to alleviate poverty in many developing countries. The objectives of the economists’ basic needs approach were similar to the conclusion of John Rawis’s philosophical system that everyone should have access to ‘basic social goods’.1 Simultaneously, in a parallel and complementary development, international human rights access to goods were recognised first in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)2 and subsequently as part of the Declaration on the Right to Development (1986).3