Human Development and Capabilities

This book explores the interface between copyright and higher education, and their complementarities for the advancement of sustainable human development. In its broader sense, the concept of human development is noted as a set of freedoms and human capabilities that are essential for human flourishing. Adopting a rights-based human development and capability approach (HDCA), this book primarily examines the relevant policy and legal flexibilities under the existing international copyright system, and their implications for access to knowledge required for creative innovation and higher education. Exploring the interfaces between copyright and higher education, this book argues that an unbalanced and restrictive copyright system impedes reasonable access to knowledge, and stifles creative and learning freedoms or capabilities. In effect, a restrictive copyright system results in serious ramifications for sustainable human development. In view of its findings, this book underscores the need for rethinking copyright and reframing its relevant flexibilities as users' rights that are vital for promoting creative and learning capabilities towards sustainable human development. Further, the book emphasizes the complementarities between copyright and higher education, and their joint roles for sustainable human development. Given its application of the HDCA to explore ranges of interlinked topics, this book will be of a great interest to researchers across the fields of intellectual property law, innovation, global development, human rights, and higher education.

In the context of rapid economic development and social transformation in China, this article, based on Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, explores the phenomena of inequality in China's higher education and their impact on the reproduction of social strata. It first analyzes the inequalities in educational opportunities, processes, and outcomes, identifying family background, uneven distribution of educational resources, and deficiencies in the educational assessment system as the main factors contributing to these inequalities. Through empirical data, the article demonstrates how cultural capital is transmitted and accumulated within the education system, thereby affecting individuals' social mobility. Finally, the article proposes a series of policy recommendations, including optimizing the distribution of educational resources, reforming educational training and management systems, and improving educational assessment mechanisms, to reduce educational inequality. It also provides guidance for future research directions. These measures aim to promote educational equity, break the solidification of social strata, and achieve social harmony and progress.

In global times, university education policy that holds the greatest promise for social responsibility is the focus here; the argument made is that such policy ought to be conceptualised using a normative human development and capabilities approach, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Their ideas offer a values‐based way of seeing higher education policy and development. Reasons are advanced for the necessary contribution of universities to the public good and to poverty reduction, while the contested purposes of universities are further outlined before human development and capabilities are presented for consideration as a superior approach to that of dominant reductionist human capital policies. The political dimension of policy development is acknowledged and explored to show that different normative frameworks generate different policies. The ideas are operationalised in relation to pedagogical arrangements and in the indexing of policy aims informed by human development, against pedagogies and graduate capabilities.

This chapter is a synopsis of key themes addressed throughout the book. These themes are central to approaching community engagement and service-learning from the human development and capability approach as a way of advancing human development and the common good. The chapter starts by providing a synthesis of the dominant framing of community engagement and service-learning, which includes the functionalism, constructivism and emancipatory-critical approaches. Acknowledging the value of each approach, the chapter delves into re-framing community engagement and service-learning as a human development and common good project. This is done through asking human development and common good–related questions; identifying dimensions of community engagement and service-learning that point towards human development and the common good; and focusing on critical and honest dialogue, deliberation and collective reasoning that accord dignity and respect for each partner. The chapter provides theoretical and practical implications for partnerships between universities and external communities in human development and the common good.

L'objectif des auteurs de cet article est double. Il s'agit d'une part de presenter une etude exploratoire sur les tendances actuelles temoignant de l'emergence d'un nouvel activisme non gouvernemental dans le champ de l'education et d'autre part de dresser un cadre analytique afin d'evaluer l'importance de cet activisme, en elaborant des concepts bases sur les recherches ayant porte sur les nouveaux mouvements sociaux et les debats theoriques actuels a propos de la societe civile mondiale.

Objective of the study is to identify changes in perceptions of the value of higher education in the mass consciousness of young Belarusians, Russians and Chinese, as well as to clarify the real possibilities of obtaining it in each of these countries, taking into account the social stratification of the population and other factors. The article shows how the attitude of young people to higher education in selected countries has changed in the last decade, and what factors in these countries caused these changes. The trends of differentiated attitudes towards higher education among young people representing different social strata of the population are revealed. The methodological basis of the research. The article proceeds from the principle of social justice in its application to the problem of assessing the opportunities of different groups of young people to get equal access to higher education. Social justice is one of the terminal values for the population of post-Soviet Belarus and Russia, since the Soviet Union cultivated the idea of social equality and ensuring equal access to higher education regardless of the income level of different social groups. The value of equal access to higher education remains in the mass consciousness today. However, as the market economy develops in these countries, the cost of paid higher education increases, which in the current difficult socio-economic conditions makes it unattainable for young people from low-income segments of the population and forces these young people to look for other strategies for successfully entering the labor market. In China, high competition for admission to the second-stage programs of higher education makes it unattainable for a large number of young people who have insufficiently high academic performance, even if there are material opportunities for admission to paid education. This factor has caused the mobility of Chinese youth to Russia and Belarus to obtain a master's degree, which is necessary in the future for employment. The empirical basis of the study is statistical data on changes in the number of students in the higher education system in Russia and Belarus, secondary vocational education in Russia, as well as available statistics on higher education in China. For an in-depth study of the opinions of Chinese youth who came to Belarus, data from sociological studies of Chinese students who studied at master's programs were used, which clarified the reasons that prompted them to come to study in Belarus, personal motives in studying, expectations from the education they receive in terms of future employment and improving social status. Similar questions were found out in the national survey of Belarusian students conducted in 2022 (n = 2666). Research results. In the article, from the standpoint of the continuing value orientation of post-Soviet Russian and Belarusian society on the equality of youth access to higher education as a terminal value, it is shown that, firstly, the problem of social inequalities in higher education is relevant for both countries, but manifests itself in different ways. In Russia, young people with insufficient financial resources have begun to reorient from higher to secondary vocational education; in Belarus, young people are limited to bachelor's degree, not considering further continuation of education practically valuable for entering the labor market. In turn, Chinese youth, who do not have the opportunity to realize the need for a second-level education at home, go abroad, since only a high level of education guarantees them employment and social status in their country. Secondly, the relationship between the issues of access to higher education, the income of the population and the subsequent access of young people to the labor market has been revealed. With a lack of income, low-resource groups prefer to focus on secondary vocational education or bachelor's degree, which guarantee young people a faster entry into the labor market and financial independence. Resourceful Chinese young people are ready to invest in obtaining a master's degree abroad, because without it they may not find a job in China at all. Thirdly, modern practice shows that, despite the stereotypical high ratings of higher education by young people, in a specific life situation, in all three countries, they are oriented towards obtaining education instrumentally. Prospects of the study are related to further analysis of the dynamics of attitudes of young people to receive education at different levels in the context of changes in household incomes and strategies for entering the labor market. According to the author, management structures need to monitor the dynamics of changes in the attitude of young people to higher education, since highly educated personnel are the driver of the development of any society. The social discontent of the youth cohort is a danger to the political stability of society.

Human development aims to expand people’s capabilities to be and do what they value being and doing. Having knowledge and getting a critically-oriented education are crucial components in forming a good life plan with genuine choices. When we teach the human development and capability approach, we therefore need to keep in mind that our pedagogy ought to be consistent with the core principles of the approach itself. It ought to be both a critical and humanizing pedagogy. An education process that humiliates students or reduces their confidence as they learn about human development ideas would certainly not be appropriate for enabling transformation and the expansion of capabilities.

Theory has influenced policy in international development but the interaction has been a two-way process. While theories legitimated new policy, appraisal of policy and experience have given rise to theoretical insights. But of the many competing ideas and theories, which ones influence policy? This article analyzes the influence of Sen's capability and human development approach on the recent evolution of policy agendas in international development, notably the consensus on MDGs and on poverty as the priority concern. It argues that the capability approach played an important role in the contestations over structural adjustment and Washington Consensus policies that led to the new consensus over the MDGs, and help legitimate them, the neoliberal policy approaches of the Washington Consensus remain intact. This illustrates an important distinction between normative and causative ideas. The new consensus has adopted the normative ideas of the capability approach but not the causative ideas. These normative ideas were used to provide a new narrative for international development, not a new policy framework.

Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations: VIII. Distribution of Income by Size

This article seeks to re-invigorate debate about how we theorise inequalities in higher education. The work of sociologist Basil Bernstein has not yet been brought to bear in this area, despite the affordances it brings in teasing out the implicit rules that perpetuate inequalities in higher education. Drawing on empirical findings from a qualitative study into the impact of university-led ‘outreach’ work in the UK context, the article applies and tests the work of Bernstein. It is argued that his framework offers the analytical precision to expose the implicit rules and principles that underlie young people’s encounters with higher education.

The purpose of this study is to assess tourism development in the context of Sen’s capability approach. The study developed a model to investigate the relationship between tourism development and human development while focusing on two countries, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The study applied a cointegration technique based on the Granger representation theorem. Overall, tourism development and human development reveals a tenuous relationship in both cases, reflecting some threshold effect. The importance of tourism growth is merited in the distribution of its benefits and the extent that tourism receipts are allocated to support human development (public health, education, safety, etc.). Rising incomes will not necessarily translate into human development performance, thereby rendering support to Sen’s contention that well-being should not be measured by its instrumental antecedents (such as income) alone. Private incomes through tourism expansion seem to matter most at lower levels of human development.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the public policies adopted to cope with the ensuing crisis had a significant impact on higher education and research institutions, and this captured the attention of numerous scholars. However, most of the analyses, especially those adopting a gender perspective, have focused on the impact of the pandemic on women as individuals (individual capabilities), while little attention has been paid to the impact on institutions and processes of structural change (collective capabilities). The capabilities approach (CA) is useful for analysing gender inequalities in higher education, and has also been used to examine the impact of the crisis on certain groups and situations. Based on the adaptation of this approach by Robeyns (2003) and Baser and Morgan (2008) to emphasise the importance of collective capabilities for individuals, institutions and society at large, this paper examines the institutional impact of the pandemic by drawing from the experiences of the six institutions in the GEARING-Roles project implementing gender equality plans (GEPs). To this end, we combine desk research of secondary sources with qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with representatives of the GEP implementers and observations of project meetings carried out between April 2020 and June 2022. Our findings indicate a considerable impact on the collective capabilities of the change agents in the participating institutions, which stem mainly from a lack of institutional commitment to the gender equality agenda, mobility restrictions and limited social relations. However, some positive elements also emerge, such as the teams’ exceptional capacity to adapt to adverse circumstances.

Tourism specialization, economic growth, human development and transition economies: The case of Poland

This special issue of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities focuses on two areas of substantial and growing importance to the human development and capability approach: disability and health. The research on disability, health and the capability approach has been diverse in the topics it covers, and the conceptual frameworks and methodologies it uses, beginning over a decade and a half ago in health (Ruger 1998) and more than a decade ago in disability (Baylies 2002).1 We are pleased to share a set of articles in these two areas. The first set of articles focuses on disability, while the second set of articles focuses on health and the health capability paradigm (HCP), in particular.

The increase in popularity of higher education has improved the talent competitiveness of China on the global stage and highlighted the function of higher education in fostering social prosperity and development. But, as higher education has continued to advance, other issues have surfaced. Although enrollment chances have risen, there is still inequity in the distribution of opportunities, particularly across genders. The gender disparity in the growth of Chinese higher education is therefore examined and discussed in this article. The analysis and comparison approach is used to explain the causes and solutions to gender inequality in Hong Kong and Mainland China's higher education stages. It is discovered that there are gender bias-causing similarities and differences between Hong Kong and Mainland China. The study's findings are that traditional Chinese beliefs have an impact on gender inequality in higher education in Hong Kong and Mainland China. In several professions and textbooks in Hong Kong, there are very serious gender stereotypes, whereas, in Mainland China, gender inequality is greatly influenced by the urban-rural divide. The remedies for gender disparity examined in this research have a mitigating impact but do not actually solve the issue. China should establish policies in the future that are better suited to its own national circumstances and guarantee that the policies are implemented effectively.