From Growth to Basic Needs

Abstract

How is it that, in spite of growing hostility and misconceptions,the concept “basic human needs” has been widely accepted? In order to understand this, it is helpful to reflect on the internal logic of the development of the concept and on the way in which accumulating experience has called for successive responses. Otherwise we might be tempted to say that the international development community takes up, from time to time, new publicity slogans, new fads and fashions, or that we are acting out a comedy of errors. Basic needs is not just another fad. (Nor, of course, is it the revelation of ultimate truth.) It is no more, but also no less, than a stage in the development of thinking and responding to the challenges of development over the last 20 to 25 years. The following brief survey of the evolution of our thinking has to simplify, but I believe that the main features are correct.² If, in the following pages, the deficiencies of pre-basic-needs approaches are stressed and the virtues of the basic-needs approach overstressed, this is done in order to bring out sharply its distinctive features. It is not intended to imply either that the previous approaches have not taught us much that is still valuable, or that the basic-needs approach is not subject to some of the objections raised to the earlier approaches.