CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Miskolczi, Bernadett |
|---|---|
| Title | What UNDP really means by development and why it matters - case study of the 2020 Human Development Report |
| Summary | Development as a concept is heavily contested within the international community. In this sense, what the UN Development Programme means by development matters gravely. The narrative that policymakers, researchers and development specialists build around international development implies divergent conceptualizations of human progress and legitimizes actions that aim to create a better future for humankind, hence having a crucial role in how we think and act regarding development. Through a multi-method approach- combining computer-assisted content analysis and discourse analysis – in the present study, by scrutinizing the Human Development Reports from 1990 until 2022, I identify four distinct narratives, namely: “development defined in social terms,” “development as political and institutional reforms,” “development and climate change” and finally, “development defined in economic terms.” Currently, the most dominant narrative being “development and climate change”, my analysis covers the changes that happened in the language that describes human progress in relation to climate change. In this thesis, I argue that the current conceptualization of development in the context of the Anthropocene does not meet the requirement of an inclusive development agenda, since it solely allows one cultural framing, in this case the framing of a Western-centric, technocratic description of human-nature relations. Whereas the reimagination of the human development journey should be sensitive toward social inequalities, and critical toward gender, race and class disparities globally. |
| Supervisor | Li, Andrew X. |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/miskolczi_bernadett.pdf |
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