The Human Development Report 2020: “The Next Frontier—Human Development and the Anthropocene”

The 2022 Special Report: “New Threats to Human Security in the Anthropocene—Demanding Greater Solidarity”

The February 2022 Special Report is described as “part of the work leading to the 2021/2022 Human Development Report” (UNDP 2022a: xi). When we compare its vocabulary with that of HDR 2020, we see both continuities and differences (Table 3). Again, I highlight in italics some notably high or low frequencies. Continuities include high frequencies for “reason,” “crisis,” and “resilience”; little or no use of “populism,” “nationalism,” “capitalism,” human “needs,” or “overconsumption”; and still considerable, though now much less, use of “innovation.” Differences from HDR 2020 include far less use of “democracy,” “vulnerability,” “tipping point(s),” “future generation(s),” “stewardship,” “mechanism,” and “navigate”; and much increased use of “emotion,” “human rights,” and especially “trust,” “solidarity,” and—above all—“human security” and “insecurity.”

The main thrusts of the report are stated in the Overview. First, it highlights the prevalence and growth of felt insecurity, strongly associated with low and falling trust (UNDP 2022a: 6), and diagnoses that a “new generation of interacting threats [are] playing out in the Anthropocene context” and that “our development patterns drive human insecurity” (ibid.). Second, it proposes the addition of solidarity (international, but also intra-national), a principle highlighted in the UN Secretary-General's 2021 report Our Common Agenda, to join the headline human security “strategies” of “protection” and “empowerment.” Those were stressed by the Ogata-Sen Commission on Human Security (CHS 2003) and then adopted in UN discourse. Third, it offers a policy vision in which protection, empowerment, and solidarity each promote agency and are in turn enabled by agency (UNDP 2022a: Figure 4). One must add, though, that solidarity with certain people can often be combined with enmity toward certain others and can undermine the agency of the latter; and that more agency by some groups can increase insecurity for others, as we perhaps see, for example, in the current working of “social media.”

Part I of the report enlarges on these propositions. First, on widespread and growing insecurity, the report discusses both objective and subjective insecurity. Regarding objective insecurity it underlines HDR 2020's reminder that no high HDI (Human Development Index) country has yet achieved a long-term sustainable system; high HDI does not guarantee human security. Indeed, the report notes that the emergence of COVID-19 illustrated how “the patterns of development that we have been pursuing inflict many of the drivers of insecurity we are confronting” (UNDP 2022a: 14).

Regarding subjective insecurity, the report posits that “Using a human security lens implies considering people's views. What constitutes fear, want and dignity depends largely on people's beliefs” (UNDP 2022a: 15). It stresses the high and growing felt insecurity even before the pandemic, despite major “improvements in people's wellbeing” (ibid.: 13), and corroborates this with the results of a new Index of Perceived Human Security. By “wellbeing” it seems here to mean material well-being, or specifically those elements that are covered (or are attempted to be covered) by conventional well-being measures. These measures can exclude numerous aspects that people consider important (Gasper 2005, 2007), like exposure to risk and stress, relations with nature, family, and friends, being treated with respect, and much more. Yet the report insists on calling such narrow measures “wellbeing,” which leads it to attribute the disparities in relation to subjective measures to “the neglect of agency” (UNDP 2022a: 14).

This first major claim, of growing insecurity, supports the revival of human security analysis. Initially the report declares that such analysis dates from the 1990s (UNDP 2022a: 24), but it then recognizes that the concept represents the UN's “foundational ideas,” from the 1940s or earlier, of the interconnection of human rights, peace and conflict, and development—the “human security frame” (ibid.: 25). What dates from the 1990s is the label “human security.” The report then adopts a somewhat different specification of the “established [frame] for the human security concept” (ibid.: 27), namely the 2003 Ogata-Sen report Human Security Now. This has indeed been the main frame for subsequent work in the New York apex of the UN system, in the UN Trust Fund for Human Security, the associated Human Security Unit (HSU), by the Secretary-General's Special Adviser on Human Security, and in the resulting 2012 General Assembly Resolution 66/290.

Given this specification, the report can argue that “the human security frame” has a blind spot regarding the Anthropocene (UNDP 2022a: 14, 24, 36), for it equates the frame to the apex-level work just mentioned and to Ogata-Sen. It ignores here decades of work on environment and human security, such as in the UN University's institute of that name (2003–) or the Global Environmental Change and Human Security research program (1999–2010).¹

It then calls for major extensions of the “human security frame” as so specified: more stress on agency, even beyond what Sen implanted in the Ogata-Sen report, and a commitment to solidarity (intra-national and international). It extols “the instrumental role of agency for human security” (UNDP 2022a: 26) as well as its independent value, the freedoms dimension. We should beware, though, of treating all agency as good. Agency is compatible with any goal, such as destroying one's rivals. It needs to be partnered with solidarity. Further, the report's model of a “virtuous cycle of agency, empowerment and protection” (ibid.: 27) within a group or for an individual within a group can fail if negative dynamics exist between groups. So new social contracts within societies are not enough (ibid.: 28–29); intergroup interconnectedness must be respected too. Here the report interestingly observes that “appeals to protect others from threats appear to be a more evocative and powerful motivator for eliciting ‘cosmopolitan behaviour’—meaning, caring more about the world as a whole than [about] one's national in-group—than appeals to transfer from the well-off to those less privileged” (ibid.: 29).

The report (UNDP 2022a: 31ff.) calls too for involvement of agents besides governments and multilateral organizations; for a whole world focus, not only on lower-income countries; for extending attention beyond “mainly physical” threats (ibid.: 31); and for integral analysis, not siloed discussion of each type of threat. Its Table S1.1 offers examples of policy packages that can jointly promote empowerment, protection, and solidarity in responding to twenty-first-century challenges. All these features, plus attention to subjective insecurity and solidarity, have in fact been present in much human security work for decades (see, e.g., UNDP 1994 on solidarity via “global compacts,” and work on subjective insecurity by authors like Jennifer Leaning and in several national HDRs, reviewed in Gómez, Gasper, and Mine 2013), but they have not always been prominent in the practices led from the UN apex by the Trust Fund and the HSU.

The remaining chapter in Part I notes “how security threats arise ‘out of the interconnections between different aspects and forces in particular situations’” (UNDP 2022a: 45, quoting Elliott 2015), and how the COVID-19 pandemic shows how individual shocks interact with other conditions and trends, generating “ever more systemic negative surprises” (ibid.: 50). Parts of the chapter still reflect siloed rather than integral analysis, though, with many discrete examples of the type “shock X may cut GDP by a few percent.” These do not explore the likely human reactions, contributions to societal unrest, conflict, and disorder, that could lead to far greater impacts. We will see that HDR 2022 is stronger here.

Part II of the report, “Tackling a New Generation of Threats to Human Security,” proceeds through a series of sectors. The chapter on digital technology is thin and has little on the links of new social media to mistrust, non-solidarity, and conflict. However, HDR 2022 explores those in depth. Chapter 4, on currently rising violent conflict, while again brief, is more incisive and links effectively to other chapters. It reports an emerging “development-with-insecurity trend, where violent conflicts increase in parallel with progress in human development” (UNDP 2022a: 79), related to the interactions of multiple factors. “Confronting the interconnected challenges that build conflict tensions and [could also] sustain peace in an era of compounding threats thus requires a sense of solidarity” (ibid.: 80). The chapter presents, as the distinctive added value here of human security analysis, a focus on felt insecurity and its impacts. For example, “conflict is not only a threat to physical safety but may also raise barriers to trust, solidarity, agency and empowerment, key principles needed to face the new generation of human security threats” (ibid.: 90). (This line of discussion is taken much further in HDR 2022.) The chapter adds insights from complexity theory for strengthening the resilience and sustainability of social-ecological systems, insights that belong in the report's central theoretical apparatus. Notably, the fundamental “uncertainty, unpredictability and irreproducibility” (ibid.: 81) in social processes, due to hyper-complexity, as in the processes around conflict, mean that no standardized models will work and in situ learning and adaptation are required. These ideas too are returned to and used in HDR 2022.

In contrast to the preceding two brief chapters, Chapter 5 on inequalities sprawls, and seeks to also cover all issues of identity: the plurality of and within identities. In every context, various groups can be distinguished, and every person can be seen as simultaneously belonging to many groups. It asserts that “The frame of human security has not always fully accounted for the different concerns of varied social groups” (UNDP 2022a: 94)—even though Sen, a founding father of this frame, has always explored such variety. This leads the chapter into a long inventory of risks, separately, group by group, without special attention to perceptions and emotions, intersectional combinations, or sudden declines. The discussion of responses returns to a series of broad appeals for more agency: “Agency is key … When discriminated groups are able to shape decision-making, potential tensions between protection and empowerment strategies diminish” (ibid.: 107). Agency will supposedly “be the basis for solidarity … [and help] incorporate intersectionality in human security” (ibid.). These and similar claims are underdeveloped and may rest on an under-differentiated treatment of agency, presumed to be always good. Some increases in agency that eliminate vulnerability could, for example, foster egoism. More convincingly, the numerous international human rights conventions are stressed as policy tools (ibid.: 108).

Chapter 6 on health is the last “sectoral” chapter. It highlights the now widely recognized challenge of “more frequent new and re-emerging zoonotic diseases (linked to the Anthropocene context)” (UNDP 2022a: 119), such as COVID-19. This gives us “a crucial opportunity to reaffirm a human security approach in strengthening multilateralism to better address health threats” (ibid.: 133). Infectious diseases establish the case for “healthcare systems [as] among the most promising spaces for advancing the new generation of human security strategies, combining protection, empowerment and solidarity” (ibid.: 119), notably through universalism in healthcare, as endorsed in Agenda 2030. Universalism is based on a logic of shared interests, in addition to acceptance of societal responsibility for those in need. The chapter also spotlights a less recognized danger (ibid.: 124): “The mental health crisis is a human security emergency. … Roughly 10 percent of the global population suffers from mental disorders.” HDR 2022 treats this issue further.

The short conclusion, “Greater Solidarity: Towards Human Development with Human Security,” repeats that the report uses a classic UN perspective of the interdependence of peace, human rights, and development, and of the need for a global frame and principle of common security. In contrast, the Sustainable Development Goals are in practice too siloed, and “[fragmented] security approaches [give] responses [that are] likely de-equalizing, likely reactive, likely late and likely ineffective in the long term” (UNDP 2022a: 141; cf. Gasper et al. 2020). While underlining the classic perspective, the 2012 General Assembly Resolution on human security had, to ease its acceptance, stressed national-level and nationally specific solutions. Thus, renewed and heightened emphasis on global interconnectedness and the need for global solidarity is added value. Interestingly, though, the conclusion's reference to “the human security frame” is the first since the middle of the report (UNDP 2022a: 80), suggesting its limited absorption in Part II.

I have indicated various strengths and weaknesses in the 2020 HDR and the 2022 SR. Encouragingly, the HDR of 2022, published seven months after the SR, seems to combine some of these earlier reports’ respective strengths in order to counteract some of the weaknesses.

A Valuable Partial Synthesis: The Human Development Report 2021/2022 —“Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping Our Future in a Transforming World”

“…human insecurity is putting people under stress and pulling people apart.” (UNDP 2022b: 151)

The 2021/2022 HDR appeared in September 2022, so we refer to it as HDR 2022. Its scope is captured by the three parts of its title. First, “Uncertain Times” indicates the confluence, interactions, and knock-on effects of “sweeping societal transformations” on top of old, everyday uncertainties (UNDP 2022b: iii), “large and often growing inequalities and power imbalances” (ibid.: 34), intensifying polarization, and dangerous planetary change. This combination has been illustrated in the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter 1, “A New Uncertainty Complex,” elaborates on the confluence, but is familiar material to readers of the previous two reports. In contrast, its “Spotlight” annexes add insights on the links between environmental insecurity and conflict, and on how “Despite its significance, growing economic insecurity has stayed under the policy radar in many countries … [and] is not adequately reflected in standard national statistics” (ibid.: 62).

Second, “Unsettled Lives” conveys how felt insecurity is rising “nearly everywhere” (UNDP 2022b: 9), including in higher-ranking HDI countries. “The numbers of people reporting negative affect—stress, sadness, anger or worry and experiencing physical pain—have been on the rise for the past decade … [The] trend of increased stress is discernible across the world and across socioeconomic groups” (ibid.: 32). Some trends are older: “expressions of anxiety and worry in many parts of the world” have grown greatly since around 1980 in published English-, Spanish-, and German-language materials (ibid.: 9). Currently, inaccuracies and lies spread faster than serious analyses, thanks to technologically advanced media; and “Losing perceived control” (ibid.: 11) foments distrust, scapegoating, and angry nationalism. Mental illness exists on a huge scale, partly linked to major economic dislocations that now happen faster than in the past.

Third, for “Shaping Our Future in a Transforming World,” the report offers, in effect, a human security agenda for “Making people more secure through investment, insurance and innovation” (UNDP 2022b: 18), enriched now by “four motivating principles: flexibility, solidarity, creativity and inclusion” (ibid.: 17). Similarly, its “three fronts” of action to mitigate mental distress, and thereby also promote social progress, have a strong human security flavor: “preventing distress, mitigating crises and building psychological resilience” (ibid.: 74).

The second of the three parts of the title, “Unsettled Lives,” represents a major advance. While SR 2022 raised issues of perceived insecurity, it did not explore these in depth. HDR 2022 does this in its chapter 2, “Unsettled Minds in Uncertain Times: Mental Distress—an Obstacle to Human Development.” It covers mental stress and distress related to the Anthropocene—through traumatizing events, physical illness, eco-anxiety, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, digitalization, lockdowns, and economic insecurity (UNDP 2022b: 78–79)—but also examines more generally the importance and impacts of mental distress, as part of a belated update of UNDP human development thinking to cover feelings and insecurity. For example, “PTSD is common among the general population [not only combatants], caused by child abuse, domestic violence, life-threatening accidents, political violence, human rights violations and disasters associated with natural hazards” (ibid.: 96); “in Iraq, for example, the prevalence of PTSD among young people ages 17–19 is 25 percent, and more than two-thirds of adult men suffer from anxiety and emotional instability” (ibid.: 88). Mental distress can undermine many functions of both children and adults, directly and in the long-term, including by reducing ability to convert resources into capabilities and to choose effectively among opportunities (ibid.: 75). Economic insecurity can thus, via mental distress, reinforce economic inequality, including in subsequent generations (ibid.: 82).

The report still talks of “a disconnect between wellbeing achievements and security” (UNDP 2022b: 110), equating “wellbeing” with narrow measures that ignore many of its aspects. This leads perhaps to excessive stress on uncertainties as causes of the gaps between measured objective well-being and subjective well-being. HDR 2022 has, arguably, not yet absorbed some implications of people's nature as social beings; Jordan (2008: 128, 136), in contrast, held that the main sources of well-being reside in social relations in terms of “esteem, regard and empathy” and “intimacy, respect and belonging,” not in material possessions. Economic growth generates only economic value and is often antagonistic to social value in Jordan's sense (Gasper 2011a). Nevertheless, such a chapter, moving toward a more realistic picture of persons, represents a big advance for UNDP and for development economics.

Chapter 3 reiterates HDR 2020's calls “to expand people's agency and freedoms to help us navigate and flourish in uncertain times” (UNDP 2022b: 100), but it also extends the more realistic picture of persons, at length, “going beyond models of [supposedly] rational self-interest to include emotions, cognitive biases and the critical roles of culture” (ibid.). It notes: the priority of group loyalty over reason and evidence in determining most people's behavior, for example in regard to climate change or COVID-19; the even greater frequency of “motivated reasoning” (such as picking materials that suit one's claims and ignoring contrary materials) among political leaders than among the general public (ibid.: 106); and the rising ratio of emotion language compared to reason language since the 1980s, revealed by analysis of large corpora in several languages (ibid.: 107). While the matters covered, for instance “the encultured agent” and culture as a “dynamic, fluid and adaptable toolkit” (ibid.: 108), have been largely well known in other social sciences for decades, the Report feels a need to repeatedly claim (e.g., ibid.: 102, 108, 134) that it draws on “new” and “recent” insights from behavioral economics, neuroscience, and so on, to try to motivate mainstream economists to pay attention.

HDR 2022 remains fundamentally optimistic, “doubling down” on the human development approach's commitments to reasoned scrutiny, public reasoning, and deliberative democracy. Because “cognitive biases and limitations are not hardwired and universal” (UNDP 2022b: 108), they can be countered, and recognition of the power of biases and of culture also implies tools for trying to influence people to counteract the biases and limitations. The report hopes wistfully that “A plurality of sources of voice and power is not a weakness in today's uncertain times but can be a source of strength” (ibid.: 112) by providing a useful diversity of intellectual resources and motives for questioning and checking.

Chapter 4 confronts the reality of growing polarization in the face of interacting major uncertainties and unsettling. Its review of evidence indicates, first, that greater human insecurity is linked to lower trust. “Globally, fewer than 30 percent of people think that ‘most people can be trusted,’ the lowest recorded value” (UNDP 2022b: 140). Second, feelings of uncertainty intensify people's identification with their own social groups (ibid.: 142), while people tend to form negatively biased views about groups other than their own and about these groups’ members (ibid.: 144). Third, in terms of politics: “people experiencing greater human insecurity [as measured by their Perceived Human Security Index] tend to have preferences for extreme views about the government's role in the economy (full government responsibility at one extreme and full individual responsibility at the other)” (ibid.: 141) and to prefer leaders who display personal dominance rather than claim support on the grounds of presumed achievements (ibid.: 144). The report notes a long-term trend of “growing global disaffection with democratic practices,” related to a demonstrable “deterioration of critical ingredients of democracy” (ibid.: 150). Fourth, polarization of views brings hostility, distrust, increased division, and reduced communication between groups. It is fed by new technologies that instantly spread unchecked and bad quality “information” and that apply algorithms to provide users with material to reinforce their existing views.

HDR 2022 argues that we must address the root causes of polarization: unsettledness and insecurity. “Thriving under uncertainty requires human security” (UNDP 2022b: 152). It underlines that supporting people's economic security “is a foundation of the social contract between government and citizens” (ibid.: 63). Thus Chapter 4 proposes strengthening social protection systems, as elaborated also in Chapter 6. It makes suggestions for reform too of the market-driven, polarization-inducing social media world (ibid.: 152).

Chapter 5, “Advancing HD in Uncertain Times,” applies the principle that we need hopeful narratives as well as sobering projections. Like HDR 2020, the chapter is determinedly upbeat, inspired by experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic: the speed of invention of effective vaccines, the evidence that most people are ready to drastically adjust their behavior in the face of a shared necessity, and governments’ massive fiscal and monetary interventions. “Many social protection schemes saw unprecedented expansions in scope, reaching groups that have been excluded from support in the past, such as informal sector workers and the self-employed” (UNDP 2022b: 171). This has widened people's experience of many social protection measures and increased their public acceptance. For the longer term: “Rapidly evolving technologies, such as artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, and frontier ones, such as nuclear fusion, could usher in a new era of prosperity for people and planet. Opportunities abound” (ibid.: 158). But these potentially super-disruptive new technologies must, says the report, be accompanied by “broad deliberation” on social implications (ibid.: 166).

Chapter 6, “Charting Paths to Transformation: Navigating Uncertainty to Expand Human Development,” continues in the style of HDR 2020, using a series of upbeat metaphors in its title and throughout the chapter (“journey,” “navigate,” “compass,” etc.). Elsewhere the report repeatedly adopts the phrase “[while] easing planetary pressures” (found twelve times in the whole report), placed after, say, “advancing human development.” “Easing” in contrast to “solving” planetary pressures or “respecting planetary boundaries” may sound like soft-pedaling environmental threats. Even so, the report also contains a more complex and sober vision than HDR 2020. Chapter 6 warns of “a mismatch between current social arrangements struggling to promote human security and to tackle people's unsettledness … [and] a mismatch between prevalent beliefs and values and what might be needed to navigate through the uncertainty complex” (UNDP 2022b: 178). This navigation requires “First … broadening our perspective on the determinants of people's choices. And second … reflecting on more recent perspectives about what culture is, how it changes across contexts and over time and how it is used by people in strategic ways, rather than as a fixed latent variable working silently in the background” (ibid.).

Chapter 6 is the final chapter and presents a policy agenda profiled in terms of three I's. Much of it can be called a human security agenda. First are investments that provide protection (e.g., the relatively paltry USD 15 billion p.a. that is estimated as needed to prevent future pandemics; UNDP 2022b: 180). Second is a long list of diverse institutional and technical innovations, including for governance processes that can respond to hyper-complex, cross-sectoral, cross-disciplinary systemic problems marked by high diversity and volatility, through “holistic analysis, constant experimentation and the inclusion of many disciplines and perspectives” (ibid.: 181). Third is an insurance pillar, for which “A key goal is to enhance human security” (ibid.: 182), and which concerns not only standard social protection schemes but macroprudential policies such as regulation of banks, rules on deferred debt repayment in crises, access to basic services, protection of human rights, and opportunities for broad participation and public deliberation.

Two other features of the policy agenda—human rights and solidarity—are placed more marginally but deserve equal billing to the highlighted three I's. As Box 6.3 notes, human rights are foundational; they provide a strongly universal person-centered framework and can be viewed as subsuming core human security concerns (freedoms from want, fear, and indignity). Spotlight 6.1 extends the understanding of and case for solidarity, continuing from the Special Report. “Solidarity requires recognizing and incorporating the diversity of individuals, groups, perspectives and lived experiences that coexist” (UNDP 2022b: 193). Sara Ahmed is quoted at length (ibid.: 192): “Solidarity should be understood as recognizing our interconnectedness. ‘Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live in common ground’ [Ahmed 2013: 189].”

A Comparison and Assessment of the Three Reports

This trilogy of reports forms an unusually wide-ranging and deep-thinking set compared to the often rather mechanical HDRO work of the preceding decade. One sees lines of deepening in comparison to earlier HDRs and across the successive parts of the trilogy. Table 4 gives a partial conspectus through a comparison of the reports’ vocabularies. Some notably high or low frequencies are highlighted in italics. “Security” and especially “human security” received vastly more attention in SR 2022 compared to in the HDR on the Anthropocene, and their greater relative frequency is maintained to a significant extent in HDR 2022. The pattern is even more marked for “insecurity,” “human insecurity,” “unsettle,” and “solidarity.” Exposure to human security questions and literatures during the preparation of SR 2022 has thus had an impact, at least for the present. In addition, HDR 2022 has, in its own much-used phrase, “embraced” the theme of uncertainties. Correspondingly, HDR 2020’s emphases on masterful management are toned down in HDR 2022, even if not fully (e.g., “mechanisms” continue to be prominent). While “navigate” is used more, talk of “easing planetary pressures,” as if one were regulating a thermostat, becomes much less frequent.

Next, Table 5 offers a broader comparison of the three reports, in terms of their distinctive emphases and relative strengths and weaknesses. HDR 2020 displayed a spirit of techno-optimism about innovation to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, partnered by reason-guided democracy and a “stewardship” stance inspired by Indigenous wisdoms. Some of this rosy style continues in HDR 2022; for example, it speaks euphemistically (UNDP 2022b: 29–30, 177–180) of “Three layers of uncertainty” when it means three sources of insecurity. These are: “Planetary change,” by which it means environmental deterioration; “Transition uncertainty,” meaning social and economic disruption from new technologies; and “Polarization,” about which there is now little uncertainty. But the style is downsized and balanced by new emphases from SR 2022, concerning objective and felt insecurities and necessary solidarity.

Fundamentally, we see the emergence of a richer picture of persons and openness to subjectivities, and growing recognition of foundational roles of security. In a set of articles in the first volume of this journal that compared social quality theory with human development and human security thinking, Phillips (2011) analyzed several conceptions of personal and societal welfare and remarked on the presence of security themes in the stronger conceptions. Human security is the base that must be promoted, and partly even ensured, as a public responsibility, before we can enter a stage of “human development” conceived as “allowing for broader and evolving aspirations” (UNDP 2020: 41) that are largely private opportunities and responsibilities. Another contribution in that set of articles noted that “A repeated criticism of the human development approach has been that its picture of personhood is too simple and understates the formation and existence of persons as social products” (Gasper 2011a: 91). The critique includes, though it also goes beyond, underlining the relevance of needs theory: “Central to being human is that we are embodied persons with various specific requirements. This theme becomes highlighted in human security thinking” (ibid.: 92).

HDR 2022 gives substantial, if still incomplete, indication of having absorbed messages and implications from the Special Report and from human security analysis more widely. Follow-up work can draw from human needs theory (e.g., Ryan and Deci 2017) and research on well-being and social quality (e.g., van der Maesen and Walker 2012; White and Blackmore 2016). The deeper picture of persons, including attention to subjectivities, is valuable in itself, as intellectual enrichment; but further, it allows a more realistic, more careful picture of humankind, as a species fully capable of destroying itself and its environment in the foreseeable future. In a third contribution to the 2011 set in this journal, Giri (2011) “warns the ‘human’ theorists of the significance of humankind's animal heritage, and warns ‘social’ theorists that ‘the social’ is by no means automatically normatively favourable” (Gasper 2011a: 98). The “human development journey” that has been the focus of the HDRs since 1990, and which HDR 2020 speaks of repeatedly, becomes understood as facing both physical limits and some possible internal contradictions. Large and increasing shares of people feel insecure and are even mentally unwell, and “our development patterns drive [much of this] human insecurity” (UNDP 2022a: 6). Ulrich Beck's warnings (e.g., Beck 2009), that unlimited expansion by the “system world” (the impersonal mechanisms of technologies, bureaucracies, and markets) into people's “lifeworlds” increases individualization and enlarges risks, sound prescient. “Understanding this is central in human security research, whereas human development discourse that talks only of the expansion of choices is in danger of feeding the processes that Beck describes” (Gasper 2011a: 99).

In this respect the Special Report on human insecurity has revolutionary potential. For generations, even for three centuries (Hirschman 1977), economic growth has been placed centrally in the human development journey, to channel human passions and talents away from conflict toward less harmful outlets, while requiring regulation and supplementation in regard to public goods, externalities, and distributional balancing. One waits to see whether the Special Report's uncomfortable messages will disappear in subsequent work, as being unwelcome to national governments and to the controllers and main beneficiaries of existing economic systems—or whether the “human development journey” will be reconceived not as an Icarus-like explosion, supposedly for ever but in reality for a finite time, of production, purchase, and dumping of ever more stuff, but as personal and societal journeys of meaning-making, in which the human development catchphrase “reason to value” acquires real content.