Apr 14, 2016

In Episode 5 of The Rights Track, Todd asks Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs at the New School in New York, about human development and her work to develop a way of measuring and comparing how well countries do at upholding their social and economic rights obligations.

0.00-5.55 minutes

• Explanation of how the Human Development Index and associated reports came about and those involved in their concept and development
• The thinking behind the HDI and how it was designed to rival GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a measure of economic success and a better measurement of how countries and their population are progressing and developing
• How the HDI challenged current thinking and perspectives on evaluating progress by focusing on freedoms to do and be what we value
• Defining well-being as people’s capabilities e.g. the ‘right to be able to read’ or the ‘right to have an education’

5.55-9.30 minutes

• How the HDI works - its scoring system
• How the HDI enabled measurement and analysis to catch the attention of policy makers, and global leaders for the first time
• How the Index offers us interesting new insights into how well or badly a country is doing in using its economic resources to better the lives of its people (examples given of Cuba and Costa Rica)

9.30-21.25

• An explanation of the difference between human development and human rights
• How Sakiko and colleagues came to develop the Social and Economic Rights Fulfilment Index (SERF)
• Sakiko’s personal motivation for setting up an Index for measuring social and economic rights and the links between human development and human rights
• The political (Reagan-Thatcher era) context and backdrop of the development the Index and the tensions around the ideas being put forward
• Sakiko draws comparison between some of the issues of that time with what’s been happening with austerity in countries like Greece
• How and why the HDI developed into the SERF Index
• Taking account of resource constraints in the measurement and analysis
• The challenges and debates among academics and practitioners around whether or not it was possible to create an effective measurement tool for economic and social rights
• How data was key to creating the index
• The sorts of things that were taken into consideration in the Index

21.25-26.34

• The components of the SERF Index and how those things are drawn from the core rights laid out in law in the International Covenant on Economic and Social and Cultural Rights
• The Achievement Possibility Frontier - what it is and how it works
• Sakiko gives examples of how the Index is used to analyse a country’s performance on things like achieving the right to food/income etc. and compare that with other countries

26.34-end

• What the Index has achieved and how it has helped developed our ability to measure progress
• What the Index tells us over time
• The constraints that go beyond GDP, e.g. how something like Ebola can compromise how a country can deliver the right to heat
• SERF Index as a resource for researchers

Other links

• It’s about values: human rights norms and tolerance for inequality interesting article from Sakiko published on OpenGlobalRights