I feel extremely privileged to have the opportunity of speaking here today in this symposium on poverty and development. I am most grateful to the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs for its kind invitation, particularly to the Minister of International Development, Mrs. Hilde Johnson. Norway's commitment to world development has been altogether remarkable. Among many other things, it has been consistently one of the highest proportionate contributors to development assistance in the world. For example, the percentage of Norwegian national income that goes into overseas development assistance is eight times that of the United States. 1 The figure for 2000 is 0.80 per cent for Norway and 0.10 for the United States (see the Report of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, Chart 1). The Norwegian share was actually 0.91 per cent in 1999 and consistently above 1 per cent through the earlier years in the 1990s (for example, 1.05 per cent in 1994, see the World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001, Table 6.9). The slight decline is mainly due to a recalculation of the Norwegian gross national income. No less importantly, Norway's voice in international public discussions on the challenges of development has been among the most enlightened, and it has consistently been deeply sympathetic to the predicament and needs of the poorer people in the world.

The ethical as well as intellectual qualities of the great Norwegian tradition are well reflected in the Action Plan 2015 for Poverty Eradication which is being launched today. It is indeed wonderful for me to join in the inauguration of this momentous extension of the great Norwegian heritage of supportive cooperation across the borders of geography and wealth.

Freedoms as Ends

I have been asked to discuss how the conceptual framework used in my book Development as Freedom can be applied to efforts in poverty reduction. 2 Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), A good starting point for the analysis of development is, I would argue, the basic recognition that freedom is both (1) the primary objective, and (2) the principal means of development. The former is a normative claim and includes the commitment that the assessment of development must not be divorced from the lives that people can lead and the real freedoms that they can enjoy. Development can scarcely be seen merely in terms of enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience, such as a rise in the GNP (or in personal incomes), or industrialization, or technological advance, or social modernization. These are, of course, valuable - often crucially important - accomplishments, but their value must depend on what they do to the lives and freedoms of the people involved.

Economic opulence and substantive freedoms, while not unconnected, can diverge. Even in terms of being free to live reasonably long lives (free of escapable ailments and other causes of premature mortality), it is remarkable that the extent of deprivation for particular groups in very rich countries can be comparable to that in the so-called "third world." For example, in the United States, African Americans as a group have no higher - indeed have a lower - chance of reaching an advanced age than do people born in the immensely poorer economies of China or substantial parts of India (or Sri Lanka, Jamaica, or Costa Rica). 3 These and other related comparisons are presented in my 'The Economics of Life and Death,' Scientific American, 266 (1993), and 'Demography and Welfare Economics,' Empirica, 22 (1995), and also in Development as Freedom (1999), Chapters 1 and 4. The freedom from premature mortality is, of course, helped by a larger income (that is not in doubt), but it also depends on many other features of social organization, including public health care and medical insurance, the nature of schooling and education, the extent of social cohesion and harmony, and so on. So it does matter how the ends of development are understood.

Consider another example, concerning political liberties. It is sometimes asked whether political freedom is "conducive to development." Indeed, a negative answer to this question (including an often-articulated belief based on half-digested statistics that democracy is inimical to economic growth) has fuelled authoritarian political tendencies in different parts of the world. This was particularly seen in the heady days of triumphalism in east Asia - in the 1980s and early 1990s - with celebration of the alleged powers of the so-called "Asian values," oriented to order and authority, not freedom and liberty. In questioning this line of argument, we not only have to note the constructive role of freedom in society, but even the more elementary fact that political liberties and democratic rights are among the constituent components of development. Their relevance for development does not have to be indirectly established through their contribution to the growth of GNP. Politically unfree citizens - whether rich or poor - are deprived of a basic constituent of good living.

Interdependence of Freedoms and Mutual Support

Ends are indeed important, and the starting point has to be the recognition of the central importance of freedom as an end. However, we cannot stop there, since freedom is also a powerful and effective means. Freedom of one kind tends, by and large, to help the promotion of freedoms of other kinds, so that each type of freedom is also a means to other types of freedom. These connections require empirical investigation and scrutiny, and the bulk of the book, Development as Freedom, is devoted precisely to that. What a person has the actual capability to achieve is influenced by economic opportunities, political liberties, social facilities, and the enabling conditions of good health, basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiatives. These opportunities are, to a great extent, mutually complementary, and tend to reinforce one another. It is because of these interconnections that free and empowered human agency emerges as a powerful engine of development.

Returning to the issue of democratic and civil rights, seen not in terms of their own value, but in terms of their relations to other freedoms and achievements, we have to note that extensive cross-country comparisons have not provided empirical support for the often-repeated belief that democracy or civil rights are inimical to economic growth. 4 See for example Adam Przeworski et al, Sustainable Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Robert J. Barro, Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming that growth is helped by the friendliness of the economic climate rather than by the harshness of the political system.

We must also pay attention to the plentiful evidence that democracy and political and civil rights tend to enhance freedoms of other kinds (such as economic security) through giving voice to the deprived and the vulnerable. The fact that no major famine has ever occurred in a democratic country with regular elections, opposition parties and a relatively free media (even when the country is very poor and in a seriously adverse food situation) merely illustrates the most elementary aspect of the protective power of political liberty. Though Indian democracy has many imperfections, nevertheless the political incentives generated by it have been adequate to eliminate major famines right from the time of independence (the last famine was four years before that, in 1943), unlike China which did have the largest famine in recorded history in 1959-62, with 30 million deaths. The history of famines has had close links with colonialism (as in British India or Ireland), one party states (as in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, or in China or Cambodia later on), and military dictatorships (as in Ethiopia or Somalia). The very recent famines, such as those in North Korea and Sudan, have also occurred in non-democratic authoritarian regimes.

The protective power of democracy in providing security is, in fact, much more extensive than famine prevention. The poor in booming South Korea or Indonesia may not have given much thought to democracy when the economic fortunes of all seemed to go up and up together, but when the economic crises came (and divided they fell), democracy and political and civil rights were desperately missed by those whose economic means and lives were unusually battered. Democracy has become a central issue in these countries now, as it also has in others, such as Thailand. But we should not have to wait for an economic crisis to develop to appreciate the protective power of democracy.

Markets and Economic and Social Opportunities

To take another example, consider the role of markets. Again, the first thing to note is that freedom of exchange and transaction is itself part and parcel of the basic liberties that people have reason to value. The freedom to exchange goods - no less than words or gifts - does not need defensive justification in terms of their favourable but distant effects; they are part of the way human beings in society live and interact with each other (unless stopped by regulation or fiat). But that basic significance is powerfully supplemented by the effectiveness of markets in generating economic prosperity. Indeed, it is impossible to think of a prosperous economy in the contemporary world without its making extensive use of markets. This elementary connection has to be recognized before more intricate issues are taken up.

However, the interdependence of freedoms and institutions goes much further than that. The market mechanism has to work in a world of many different institutions, with which it interrelates. Indeed, even for making good use of the market mechanism, there is the antecedent issue of the freedom to enter the market, and to be able to participate in and benefit from market transactions. Entry is hard to achieve when the persons have no assets other than their own labour power, no access to credit, and no capital which can serve as collateral for borrowing. Public intervention for land reform, the promotion of micro-credit facilities and other ways of redistributing the usable resources can help market entry, and empirical studies have brought out their positive role in the working of the market economy.

Similarly, good basic education and general health care not only enhance the substantive freedoms of people directly (the freedom to read, write, count, communicate, and to lead healthy and long lives), they also serve as enabling conditions that make it easier for people to make use of the market mechanism and to share in its opportunities. It can be hard to qualify for good jobs if one is illiterate and innumerate. Bad health too can be a barrier to market participation. So the expansion of health care and basic education are not only crucial because of their direct effects on human lives, but also because they are critically important as enabling conditions for the market economy to have an adequate reach and range.

Sharing of participation is a precondition of benefiting from the market process, and the ability to participate in the market economy is radically influenced by social arrangements for education, health care, microcredit, land reform, and other public policies. The reach and success of the market economy depends on freedoms of other kinds - related to social opportunities as well as resource formation and distribution - and the different types of freedom can be seen to be thoroughly complementary to each other. The market can be a very powerful engine of development, but its power and productive role demand much more than just "freeing the markets" on which some market enthusiasts exclusively concentrate.

Women's Empowerment and Social Interdependence

To turn to a somewhat different, though related, issue, social opportunities - such as education and health care - are not only important in themselves and also as enabling conditions to enter the market economy, but they can have other important social effects, through other types of interdependence. For example, empirical studies have forcefully brought out the fact that women's empowerment through schooling, employment opportunities, etc., have the most far-reaching effects on the lives and freedoms of all - men, women and children. Women's education, in particular, not only reduces gender inequality in family life, but there is much evidence that it also sharply reduces child mortality, increases the range and effectiveness of public debates, and is much more influential than economic growth in moderating fertility rates. 5 See Development and Freedom. chapters 8 and 9, and the literature cited there. We can see its influence in the halving of the fertility rate of Bangladesh in less than two decades, and in the fact that while some districts of India, with little female literacy and rewarding employment, have quite high fertility rates (more than 4 children per couple), others with more female empowerment already have very low fertility rates (around or below 1.6 children per couple) - lower than the United States and Britain, and Norway. The impact and reach of women's empowerment and enlightened agency can be astonishingly large.

Indeed, recent medical research has brought out even more areas of interdependence. For example, based on English data, Professor D.J.P. Barker has shown that low birth weight is closely associated with higher incidence, many decades later, of several adult diseases, including hypertension, glucose intolerance, and other cardiovascular hazards. 6 See D.J. P. Barker, 'Intrauterine Growth Retardation and Adult Disease,' Current Obstetrics and Gynecology, 3 (1993); 'Fetal Origins of Coronary Heart Disease,' British Medical Journal, 311 (1995); Mothers, Babies and Diseases in Later Life (London: Churchill Livingstone, 1998). See also P.D. Gluckman, K.M. Godfrey, J.E. Harding, J.A. Owens, and J.S. Robinson, 'Fetal Nutrition and Cardiovascular Disease in Adult Life,' Lancet, 341 (1995). The robustness of the statistical connections as well as the causal mechanisms involved in intrauterine growth retardation must, of course, be further scrutinized, but as matters stand, the medical evidence so far allows us to link causally a number of distinct empirical observations from developing countries. For example, South Asia (including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) not only has very high incidence of maternal undernourishment, but also extraordinary frequency of underweight births, and - as it happens - an exceptionally high propensity to suffer from (and frequently, die from) cardiovascular diseases. The totality of these data, combined with results of medical research by Barker and others, strongly suggest a causal pattern that goes from the nutritional neglect of women to maternal undernourishment, to fetal growth retardation and underweight babies, to greater incidence of cardiovascular afflictions much later in adult life (along with the phenomenon of undernourished children in the shorter run). What begins as a neglect of the interests of women ends up causing adversities in the health and survival of all - even at an advanced age.

Interdependent Strategies for Poverty Removal

It is this world of interdependence which the approach of "development as freedom" attempts to bring out and place among the centrally relevant considerations for policy formulation and institutional reform. At the risk of some oversimplification, I shall argue that the approach particularly identifies the following principal issues as being critically relevant for understanding the policy demands of removing poverty and deprivation, like the new Action Plan for Poverty Reduction that is just being launched. First, poverty cannot be judged adequately in terms of low incomes only, and has to be seen as unfreedoms of various kinds, which require removal. Second, the world in which we live is thoroughly interdependent, and unfreedoms of different kinds feed each other. Third, the positive side of the interdependences is that the different freedoms also feed each other, so that enhancement of one type of freedom tends typically to contribute to strengthening other types of freedom. Fourth, it would be a mistake to think of different freedoms in some kind of a temporal sequence, e.g., economic growth before social opportunity, or prosperity before democratic and civil rights, or order before liberty. They have to be considered together, and by tackling the different demands simultaneously, development efforts can be effective and powerful. The Action Plan is right to take an inclusive and integrative approach.

Human Rights, Development and Freedoms

Let me now move on to two specific issues dealing with the relation between, on the one hand, the perspective of "development as freedom," and on the other, the mainstream concerns about "human rights" and "sustainable development" that tend to figure prominently in the literature on development (and are significantly present in the Norwegian Action Plan as well). I begin with human rights, and ask: how do human rights relate to the focus on freedom? How do we integrate development as freedom with demanding and pursuing human rights?

One way of thinking about the connection of freedom with rights in general and human rights in particular is to begin with the elementary point that while freedom is an object of value, it carries by itself no obligation on the part of others to do anything about it. Correlate obligations are, however, central to the idea of rights, and any specification of rights must carry with it associated duties and obligations. Thus, the recognition of a freedom as a right immediately broadens the relevance of freedom by linking it with duties to secure that freedom which the state, or the society, or other individuals have to acknowledge. We can, in fact, separate out two aspects of a standard concept of rights: (1) it aims at the freedom of the right-holder to do certain things or achieve some conditions, and (2) it demands some correlate obligations on the part of others (which can take the form either of non-interference or of positive assistance) to help in the realization of this freedom by the right-holder.

I turn now to human rights in particular. Human rights are rights that individuals have not by virtue of their citizenship of any particular country, but because of their status as human beings. These may or may not be legislated rights, but in so far as they are valued, that valuation can include the importance that is attached to the relevant persons' freedoms and also the responsibility that others have - irrespective of citizenship, nationality and other denominations - to help this person to attain these freedoms. If others can help, then there is a responsibility that goes with it. 7 This is discussed in Development as Freedom, Chapter 12. Even if it is not specified who will have to do what to help the person whose rights are threatened or neglected, there is a general need for any responsible agent, who is in a position to help, to consider his or her general duty to help others (when reasonably feasible). The philosophical concept that is involved in these obligations is what Immanuel Kant called "imperfect obligations." 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788; translated by L.W. Beck, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956). They are not the "perfect obligations" of a specific agency to do some prespecified things. Rather, the claims are addressed generally - in Kant's language "imperfectly" - to anyone who can help, in whatever way they can help. 9 I have discussed the philosophical connections in my 'Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason,' Journal of Philosophy, 97 (2000).

Some of these obligations tend to be more fully specified than others. For example, the insistence that the state must not arbitrarily arrest a person (if that is seen as a human right, no matter whether the laws of the land prohibit arbitrary arrest or not) is more exactly characterized than, say, the claim that a person has a right to expect help in avoiding starvation (it demands that, generally though imprecisely, that all those who are in a position to help should try to consider what they can do to prevent this eventuality from occurring). Human rights can take either form, with or without exactly characterizing the specific duties that the obligation-bearers are asked to accept.

In fact, even the fulfilment or violation of precisely specified obligations can go with imperfect obligations of others to help in a general way. Since gross violations of serious obligations can be seen as making the states of affairs worse, even others not directly involved in the violation of a perfectly specified obligation (for example, person A's being assaulted by person B) may have a general duty to help (in this case, to try to prevent B's assault on A). For example, if a person were severely assaulted in full view of others and her cries for help were completely ignored, we can argue that three bad things happened: (1) the victim's freedom was violated and so was her right not to be assaulted, (2) the assaulter transgressed the immunity that others should have from intrusion (in this case, a violent intrusion) and violated his perfect obligation not to assault others, and (3) the others who did nothing to help the victim also transgressed their general - and imperfect - obligation to help others (which they could reasonably be expected to provide). They are interrelated failings, but distinct from each other.

Human rights, thus conceived, have immediate relevance to the perspective of "development as freedom." First, it is concerned with realization of freedoms, and since freedoms can be of different types, so must human rights. It would be inadequate to insist that, say, human rights should cover only political liberties but not economic freedom, such as freedom from hunger (as some have proposed), or that economic rights should have procedural or temporal priority over political liberty (as others have suggested). All the relevant freedoms are involved simultaneously. Second, since human rights are not related to citizenship, the nature of the laws of the land need not limit the range of coverage of these rights. Third, for obligations too, the demands of duty can reach across boundaries of countries, and can include both actual assistance and also the use of voice and articulation to clarify and argue for global efforts (as Norway has frequently done). Fourth, the form of assistance or global efforts (including institutional reforms) would have to be worked out pragmatically in the light of likely consequences on the freedoms of the people. Economic, social and political analyses are, thus, crucial for the approach of human rights seen in the perspective of development as freedom. The conceptual clarifications have to be supplemented by causal and consequential analysis, with appropriate recognition of the extensive interdependences in the world, on which I have already commented.

Sustainable Development and Freedoms

I turn, finally, to sustainable development. How does it relate to development as freedom? The concept of "sustainable development" is a powerful general idea that has been widely used in environmental analysis since its exploration in the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (published in 1987), the pioneering manifesto prepared under the leadership of Gro Brundtland. 10 World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). The Brundtland Report chose to define "sustainability" not in terms of preserving the environment itself, but the quality of our lives, or the fulfilment of our needs. Sustainable development is defined in that report as meeting "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." The idea has been further refined by Robert Solow in his monograph An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability (published in 1992). His formulation sees sustainability as the requirement that the next generation must be left with "whatever it takes to achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own and to look after their next generation similarly." 11 Robert M. Solow, An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1992), p. 15.

Is the Brundtland-Solow approach to sustainability intellectually satisfactory? In many ways, it is remarkably so. In particular, it provides an immediate motivation for environmental preservation. The object is not so much to sustain the environment itself, but the lives we can lead in that environment. It integrates the importance of preserving the environment to the functional role of the environment, thereby avoiding environment fetishism. Also, the Brundtland-Solow approach gives us a very inclusive concept. Any ingredient of a good life, which can influence living standards, is taken to be potentially important.

The approach can, however, be enriched, I would argue, by incorporating a direct concern for freedoms within the framework of sustainability. To look only at living standards, rather than freedoms, can be quite limiting. First, the focus exclusively on human living standards makes the approach perhaps too anthropocentric. This is to some extent inescapable, since who other than human beings can decide what to sustain? But it is also anthropocentric in another - more limiting - sense. The preservation of human living standards need not be the only concern that human beings themselves have. To use a medieval European distinction, we are not merely "patients" preoccupied with just our own quality of life, but also responsible and active "agents" who are capable of judging the world around us and undertaking wider commitments to do what we judge we should do. As Buddha argued in Sutta Nipata, since we are enormously more powerful than the other species, we have some responsibility towards them that arises from this asymmetry of power. We can indeed make a significant distinction between (1) our ability to preserve the quality of our human lives, and (2) our ability to preserve what we think is worth preserving (perhaps including other species), not merely to the extent that they impinge on the quality of our own lives. In the perspective of freedom, we are not just locations of living standard, but active agents, and the freedom-oriented view does broaden the reach of sustainable development.

Second, the Brundtland-Solow approach may be too aggregative. We may attach importance to particular freedoms, even when there is no loss in the overall standard of living. The point can be brought out with an illustration that does not involve future generations, but only a contemporary confrontation. Consider the right of a person not to have smoke blown on to her face by a heavy - and indiscriminate - smoker. The right to be free of secondary smoking need not be compromised merely because the person thus affected happens to be very rich and endowed with an outstanding standard of living (particularly compared with the poor, miserable smoker). The environmental analogue of this dissension may take the form of a deteriorating environment in which the future generations are denied the presence of fresh air (because of some specially nasty emission), but where those generations are so very rich and so tremendously well served in terms of other amenities of good life that their overall standards of living are well sustained. The loss of particular freedoms matters, even when we may be doing just fine in terms of overall living standards.

A third issue concerns the ways and means of preserving the environment. If environmental policies lead to the loss of human freedom in the cause of promoting living standards, then that loss has to be particularly acknowledged, rather than either being ignored, or - more plausibly but not plausibly enough - being submerged into an aggregative accounting of the standard of living. For example, even if it turns out that restricting human freedoms through draconian policies of coercive family planning (as in, say, the "one-child family" in China) helps to sustain living standards (this is, in fact, very far from clear), it must be unequivocally acknowledged that something of importance is sacrificed - rather than sustained - through these policies themselves.

One way of seeing these critiques is to argue that what has to be sustained is not just our living standards, but rather our freedoms. The freedoms must include (in line with Solow) the freedom "to achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own and to look after [our] next generation similarly," but also our freedom to make the centrally important choices in our lives (for example about family size), our liberty to value objectives other than our own living standards (for example, preservation of some species), and also our ability to guarantee specific opportunities (such as the right to fresh air). The idea of sustainable freedoms can add something substantial to the living-standard-based notion of sustainable development. This is a way of integrating the very important concept of sustainability - rightly championed by Brundtland and Solow - with a view of human beings as agents whose freedoms matter, rather than seeing people simply as patients who are no greater than their living standards. Thus, the approach of development as freedom has something to offer also to environmental discussions in general, and to the idea of sust

A Concluding Remark

I conclude by expressing, again, my admiration for the Norwegian initiatives in development cooperation and assistance, and particularly for the breadth and range of concerns that motivate the Action Plan which we are inaugurating today. I am, of course, happy that there is much complementarity between the practical approach of the Norwegian Action Plan and the conceptual and empirical issues I have tried explore within the perspective of "development as freedom." A freedom-centred view of development has several advantages over more conventional views. I am very encouraged by the Norwegian programme's commitment to see development in its full splendour, and not in some reductionist and formulaic light. There are grounds for optimism here, and reasons for being appreciative and grateful.