Where is the human in human-centred approaches to development? A critique of Amartya Sen’s ‘Development as Freedom’

This chapter engages with Foucault’s critical exploration of shifts and transformations in liberal frameworks of governmental rationality to consider how our understanding of the human subject has been transformed within development discourses. The focus is upon today’s human-centred approaches, in which individual autonomy or freedom is the central motif. The intention is to genealogically draw out the changing nature of Western discourses of development in order to examine how development and autonomy have been radically differently articulated in discourses of Western power and how today’s discursive framing feeds on and transforms colonial and early postcolonial approaches to the human subject