Raymond Apthorpe, Human Development Reporting and Social Anthropology
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Methodological implications for case study research (ethnography)
Apthorpe’s article discusses how social anthropology may be committed to current public issues through policy analysis and ultimately to make development policy matter. Apthorpe proffers the question specifically regarding what would follow if social anthropologists were to become seriously involved in both international and national human development reporting. This question presents an assumption that social anthropology has by far been an omitted discipline in approaches towards human development reporting. He embarks on reviewing the present approach to human development reporting used particularly by the UNDP and suggests the exploration of a new approach which takes on board social anthropology as a widening of disciplinary participation.
Apthorpe argues that while UNDP’s approach to human development reporting has been widely admired though it continues to be a subject of scrutiny, it also needs further strengthening of which learning and improvements can be had through individual country or national HDRs carried out by a country’s own research and statistical centres. Apthorpe takes note that most individual country reports publishes as far only as annual Economic Reports, issues no comparable Social Report, and therefore lacks the justification for UNDP’s core construct that which is ‘human development’.
Apthorpe notes the lack of significant interdisciplinarity that could have informed the conceptualizing and design of present HDRs. He narrates his experience with contrasting reception of the HDR in some countries where the most contested issues are those within the realm of social and cultural values. Cross-cultural agreements reached at the ideological level broke down as discourse became more practical and realistic at the member-country level.
