Pri's blog

The Human Development Report 2014 is entitled Sustaining human progress: Reducing vulnerabilities and Building Resilience, and if nothing else has foregrounded two of the key concepts in the current development discourse i.e. vulnerability and resilience. The concept of vulnerability In discussing vulnerability, the HDR aims to move beyond the traditional concept of vulnerability that comes from the disaster risk reduction discourse and  which is about exposure to risk and risk management including insuring against shocks and diversifying assets and incomes,    to what it calls ‘human vulnerability’ which is the prospects of eroding peoples’ capabilities and choices.  This definition can be linked to the idea of peoples’ agency, and also to Sen’s idea of entitlement  and serve to broaden the policy debate .   But unfortunately, at the outset itself the HDR then reduces human vulnerability to a categorisation of ‘who’ is vulnerable, ‘what’ th...

As the discussion on a new set of post-2015 development goals  gathers momentum, I wonder how far the transport sector has got to framing a discussion on transport development in the post-2015 development agenda.  The sector was slow in getting transport-related targets into the MDG conversation, so let’s hope there is greater energy getting mobility and access issues on to the agenda this time round. As far as the discussions on the post-2015 development goals go, they seem to be moving towards integrating the need for sustainable development goals (SDGs) mooted in the discourse following the Rio+20 summit, and the next round of millennium development goals (MDGs).   If transport is to feed into this discussion, then I believe that we may need to go back to the fundamentals. Transport is about access and mobility and is a means to an end, whether that end is increasing economic growth or improving peoples’ access to services. In the current post-2015 disc...