A/HRC/17/25 reproductive health of populations has an integral role in eliminating poverty and promoting economic growth, alongside its direct effects on individuals’ health. Ensuring access to reproductive services, including family planning, is a vital step in disrupting the “repetitive cycle” of poverty, inequality and slow economic growth that is perpetuated by limited reproductive choices.6 It has also been observed that development policies designed to improve economic conditions and living standards of communities can often have unintended effects on health; in particular, they can create additional health risks for vulnerable groups, which is known to compromise the welfare objectives of development policies.7 6. As this role of development policies in creating or exacerbating “diseases of poverty”, alongside health problems associated with industrialization, has become increasingly acknowledged, more holistic approaches to development have been sought out, and the potential for the right to health to inform and guide development practice has increased. Indeed, the ability of people to enjoy an adequate level of health is today broadly recognized as a key development goal in itself. Over the last few decades, development theory has begun to shift its primary focus from economics to human conditions. This shift finds expression in the concepts of human development and the right to development,8 and has created space for the right to health and other human rights to move closer to the centre of the process of development. II. The growing convergence of development, human rights and the right to health 7. The relationship between development and human rights has undergone numerous changes over the past five to six decades. While each began as, and largely remains, an independent approach to addressing problems of human welfare, there has been an inexorable shift within the development sphere of late towards a more humanistic model of advancement and the recognition that health has an impact on economic development. This has necessarily come to include human rights, although the form in which human rightsbased concepts and approaches are incorporated has varied, and there have been differing levels of acceptance of such concepts within the development sphere. 8. Earlier, narrower conceptions of development largely focused on indicators such as growth in GNP, rise in personal incomes, industrialization, technological advance, or social modernization.9 This left little room for the inclusion of human rights, despite the fact that the overall aim of development was the improvement of the human condition, and in that respect development and human rights have always intersected. Significant evolution occurred in the 1980s to 1990s, alongside acknowledgement of the right to development as a stand-alone right, as will be discussed in Section III. Over this time, growing acceptance of human rights discourse within the development community took place. In particular, the human development, or “capabilities” approach to development pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum appeared against the backdrop of the relative backlash against purely economic models of development that previously dominated this arena. 6 7 8 9 4 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), “XV. The ICPD and MDGs: Close Linkages”, p. XV-3. Diana E. Cooper Weil et al., The impact of development policies on health: a review of the literature (Geneva, WHO, 1990), p. 1. Alessandro Sitta, “The Role of the Right to Development in the Human Rights Framework For Development”, paper prepared for the Human Development and Capabilities Approach Association, p. 2. Available from www.capabilityapproach.com/pubs/5_1_Sitta.pdf Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3.