In the 1980s, after a decades-long emphasis on economic growth as the primary engine for development, a number of prominent economists and development practitioners heralded a new era in the conceptualization of development as primarily a human endeavor with improved life chances and quality of life as the proper end. Thus was coined the term “human development,” followed by subsequent efforts to delineate the essential dimensions of human development and the appropriate measures of a development endeavor that no longer had “growth” (and, more narrowly, increased income) as its primary indicator but now sought to measure human ends, capabilities, and opportunities. Of most prominence, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) took up this charge in the form of an annual global human development report, releasing the first one in 1990. Perhaps no other human development reports have received as much attention in the past few years as have the Arab human development reports.

The Arab Human Development Report 2005, the fourth in a series that has received much acclaim and stirred much controversy, takes up the issue of women's development in the Arab world. Through a careful reading and analysis of sections of the report that address education and economic participation, this paper offers a critique of the human capabilities framework that frames this report. I highlight critical tensions between the claim that providing education is an essential element of expanding choices and the assumptions embedded in discussions about women and education regarding which choices are acceptable and/or desirable. These tensions point to the persistence of values derived from the mandates of global capital, albeit in the new language of neoliberal choice, revealing that ‘human development’ does not represent a significant departure from earlier conceptualizations of development. I draw on my ethnographic research in Jordan as one example to interrogate such assumptions and to shed light on the ambiguities built into the educational project for young women today.

The Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (AHDR 2005), published in Arabic with English and French translations, was launched at the end of 2006. With a title carefully crafted to avoid Western development buzzwords like “empowerment” and to signal the inclusion of all women living in the region, it is the third in a series of detailed studies meant to unpack the themes of the original overview report that garnered both acclaim and criticism when it was published in 2002. The other two topical reports examine what were billed as “deficits” in knowledge and in freedom. This one tackles what the original report framed as the third major obstacle to the flourishing of the Arab world: the deficit in gender equality.