UNDP’s ‘The Next Frontier’: Rethinking Development

For a decade or so, the global financial crisis, the climate crisis, the injustice crisis, and the COVID-19 crisis have all demonstrated that the system’s stability and resilience are failing. This appears to restrict the future prospects to continuous disaster response rather than human development. Business as usual in education, economics, agriculture, industry, and health care among other fields would simply not suffice. The same may be said about the concepts of human development, which must be updated on a regular basis to meet the demands of our days. The UNDP’s human development report, “The next frontier – Human development and the Anthropocene,” was released internationally end of 2020 calling for a “great transformation that is needed to reset our societies and build back better. It emphasizes a great shift in how people live, work, and collaborate favoring development interventions that are with nature not against it and putting “people and the planet on a safe equitable and sustainable pathway.” The report was released on Tuesday, April 20 in Lebanon, aiming at sparking a discussion on how to react to the challenges of the new normal and how to maintain human progress while alleviating planetary pressure. The stress on the world have increased dramatically over the last 100 years. People have been pushing the planet to its breaking point characterized by climate change, shattered inequality, and an unprecedented number of citizens displaced by war and crises. The reports adopt what scientists believe to be the beginning of a new “geological epoch” for the planet. This age is outlined by the report as the human age or the Anthropocene, characterized by the influence of human decision that forms the primary threat to our existence. The report stresses that peoples’ and the planet’s interconnected fates should be taken into consideration. The 2020 UNDP Human Development Report is the 30-year anniversary edition. Few individuals had learned about climate change since the launch of the first Human Development Report in 1990 that questioned the centrality of economic growth as an indicator of success. Back then, the report provided a forward-looking solution to GDP by rating all countries according to whether people had the “freedom and opportunity to live a life they valued.” In doing so, the report inspires a new debate about what it is to have a “good life.” Human development is described in the report as “a continuing quest, not a destination,” with the core goal of empowering people to find and follow their own pathways to a better life rooted in expanding freedoms. This year’s report focuses on handling individuals as “agents rather than patients.”