Human Development Report des UN-Entwicklungsprogramms, 24.7.2014 (engl. Originalfassung)
This Report seeks to improve understanding and raise awareness about how reducing vulnerability and building resilience are essential for sustainable human development. In doing so, it makes the following central points:
• Vulnerability threatens human development— and unless it is systematically addressed, by changing policies and social norms, progress will be neither equitable nor sustainable.
While almost all countries have improved their levels of human development over the past few decades, recent gains have not been smooth. Progress has taken place in a context of growing uncertainty due to deeper and more-frequent shocks. From greater financial instability to high and volatile commodity prices, from recurrent natural disasters to widespread social and political discontent, human development achievements are more exposed to adverse events.
Hundreds of millions of poor, marginalized or otherwise disadvantaged people remain unusually vulnerable to economic shocks, rights violations, natural disasters, disease, conflict and environmental hazards. If not systematically identified and reduced, these chronic vulnerabilities could jeopardize the sustainability of human development progress for decades to come. Shocks from multiple causes are inevitable and often unpredictable, but human vulnerability can be reduced with more-responsive states, better public policies and changes in social norms.
• Life cycle vulnerability, structural vulnerability and insecure lives are fundamental sources of persistent deprivation—and must be addressed for human development to be secured and for progress to be sustained.
Different aspects of vulnerability can overlap and reinforce persistent deprivations. Life cycle vulnerability—from infancy through youth, adulthood and old age—can affect the formation of life capabilities. Inadequate investments in sensitive phases of life create long-term vulnerability. Similarly, vulnerability embedded in social contexts generates discriminatory behaviours and creates structural barriers for people and groups to exercise their rights and choices, perpetuating their deprivations. And fear for physical security in daily life has deeper ramifications for securing or sustaining progress.
The intersecting or overlapping vulnerabilities arising from economic, environmental, physical, health and other insecurities magnify the adverse impact on freedoms and functions. This makes it much more difficult for individuals and societies to recover from shocks. Recovery pathways and public policies must incorporate measures that build resilience and stabilizers to respond to and cope with future challenges.
• Policy responses to vulnerability should prevent threats, promote capabilities and protect people, especially the most vulnerable.
Most vulnerabilities remain persistent—a consequence of social marginalization, insufficient public services and other policy failures. Persistent vulnerability reflects deep deficiencies in public policies and institutions, societal norms and the provision of public services, including past and present discrimination against groups based on ethnicity, religion, gender and other identities. It also reveals state and societal inability or unwillingness to anticipate and protect vulnerable people against severe external shocks, many of them predictable in kind, if not in precise timing or impact.
Building resilience thus requires boosting the capacity of individuals, societies and countries to respond to setbacks. People with insufficient core capabilities, as in education and health, are less able to exercise their agency to live lives they value. Further, their choices may be restricted or held back by social barriers and other exclusionary practices, which can further embed social prejudice in public institutions and policies. Responsive institutions and effective policy interventions can create a sustainable dynamic to bolster individual capabilities and social conditions that strengthen human agency—making individuals and societies more resilient.
• Everyone should have the right to education, health care and other basic services. Putting this principle of universalism into practice will require dedicated attention and resources, particularly for the poor and other vulnerable groups.
Universalism should guide all aspects of national policies—to ensure that all groups and sections in society have equality of opportunity. This entails differential and targeted treatment for unequal or historically disadvantaged sections by providing greater proportional resources and services to the poor, the excluded and the marginalized to enhance everyone’s capabilities and life choices.
Universalism is a powerful way of directly addressing the uncertain nature of vulnerability. If social policies have a universal aim, not only do they protect those who currently experience poverty, poor health or a bout of unemployment, but they also protect individuals and households who are doing well but may find themselves struggling if things go wrong. Further, they secure certain basic core capabilities of future generations.
• Strong universal social protection not only improves individual resilience—it can also bolster the resilience of the economy as a whole.
Nearly all countries at any stage of development can provide a basic floor of social protection. They can progressively expand to higher levels of social protection as fiscal space allows. A lower income country might start with basic education and health care and later expand to offer cash transfers or basic labour protection. A higher income country with already well established basic education, health care and conditional cash transfer programmes might expand eligibility for unemployment insurance to traditionally excluded populations, such as agricultural or domestic workers, or expand family leave policies for new parents to include fathers.
• Full employment should be a policy goal for societies at all levels of development.
When employment is either unattainable or with very low rewards, it is a major source of vulnerability with lasting repercussions for individuals and for their families and communities. It is time to recognize that the opportunity to have a decent job is a fundamental aspect of building human capabilities—and, equally, to see full employment as smart, effective social policy. Providing employment opportunities all adult job-seekers should be embraced as a universal goal, just as education or health care. Full employment should be an agreed societal goal, not simply as a matter of social justice and economic productivity, but as an essential element of social cohesion and basic human dignity. Decent work that pays reasonable wages, involves formal contracts preventing abrupt dismissals and provides entitlements to social security can enormously reduce employee vulnerability, although less so in recessions. Reducing employment vulnerability is then hugely important from the perspective of reducing human vulnerability in general. Yet this is clearly difficult to do. The importance of realizing decent and full employment has long been recognized, but large-scale unemployment and underemployment continue in most countries.
• The effects of crises, when they occur, can be lessened through preparedness and recovery efforts that can also leave societies more resilient.
Sudden onset of hazards and crises, from natural disasters to violent conflicts, often occur with destructive consequences for human development progress. Building capacities in preparedness and recovery can enable communities to withstand these shocks with less loss of life and resources and can support faster recoveries. Efforts to build social cohesion in conflict areas can lead to long-term reductions in the risk of conflict, while early warning systems and responsive institutions lessen the impacts of natural disasters.
• Vulnerabilities are increasingly global in their origin and impact, requiring collective action and better international governance.
Pollution, natural disasters, conflicts, climate change and economic crises do not respect political boundaries and cannot be managed by national governments alone. Today’s fragmented global institutions are neither accountable enough nor fast enough to address pressing global challenges. Better coordination and perhaps better institutions are needed to limit transnational shocks and urgently respond to our changing climate as an integral part of the post-2015 agenda. Stronger, responsive and more-representative global governance is essential for moreeffective global action. Much can be done to improve global and national responses to crises, to prevent such crises from occurring and to reduce their magnitude.
• A global effort is needed to ensure that globalization advances and protects human development—national measures are more easily enacted when global commitments are in place and global support is available.
An international consensus on universal social protection would open national policy space for better services for all people, reducing the risk of a global ‘race to the bottom’. Elements of a global social contract would recognize the rights of all people to education, health care, decent jobs and a voice in their own future. The global agenda must seek to address vulnerability and strengthen resilience comprehensively. Whether they are pursued in defining new sustainable development goals or in the broader post-2015 discussions, a formal international commitment would help ensure universal action.
Den vollständigen Bericht finden Sie hier (pdf).