The rights most firmly associated with international development – social, economic and cultural rights – were to a large extent victims of the Cold War, when they were viewed by some as either too closely associated with the goals of Soviet socialism in the Eastern bloc or relegated to the primary goal of economic liberalisation in the West. It was only with the thawing of the Cold War in the 1980s that these rights, as Amnesty International (2014: 25) put it, began to be reclaimed and restored to a lineage that dated back to declarations of national rights in France and the United States in the late eighteenth century. These rights include: the right to work and to join a trade union; the right to education; the right to food, clothing and housing; the right to healthcare and social services; and the right to participate in cultural and scientific life (2014: 25).

Many of these rights are enshrined in United Nations (UN) resolutions and declarations, including: the Right to Development (UNGA 1986); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989); and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976). Since the mid-1960s, human rights provisions have been agreed in relation to ‘a range of racial and ethnic groups, women, indigenous peoples, children, migrant workers, and people with disabilities’ (Amnesty International, 2014: 26). This has helped to provide a legal framework for human development. As the Human Development Report states: ‘human rights lend moral legitimacy and the principle of social justice to the objectives of human development’ and, for its part, human development ‘brings a dynamic long-term perspective to the fulfilment of rights. It directs attention to the socioeconomic context in which rights can be realized – or threatened’ (UNDP, 2000: 2).

This chapter considers the contrasting approaches of two rightsdriven development agendas that emerged in the 1980s. The first is the idea of human development as the enhancement of human rights, civil liberties and individual freedoms as encapsulated in the United Nations’ Human Development Report (UNDP, 2000) and economist Amartya Sen's Development As Freedom (1999).