Next 30 August wil take place the 2018 HDCA Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) is a global community of academics and practitioners that seeks to build an intellectual community around the ideas of human development and the capability approach, and relate these ideas to the policy arena.

The conference aims to promote high-quality, policy-oriented academic research, advance intellectual debates and promote collaboration between academics and practitioners. It is open to scholars, policy-makers, practitioners, and students who are developing and actively applying the human development paradigm. Disciplines include, but are not limited to, economics, philosophy, political science and development studies. 

 

The 2018 Conference theme is "Human development and social inclusion in an urbanizing world".

Today more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas and the share is expected to reach 66 per cent by 2050. 

The city offers diverse benefits for human and economic development but it also poses numerous challenges: social and economic inequality, urban sprawl,  environmental stresses caused by cities, the recent flow of immigrants from poor and unstable countries to the cities of developed nations. 
All of these trends challenge governments and society as a whole to find new ways to foster human development and social inclusion for all.

 

The conference proposes to analyse the urban issues through the lens of the capability approach and human development framework and in light of global experiences. It will examine how the approach can provide innovative tools and criteria to assess quality of life and how its conditions are distributed in the context of cities. The conference will also examine how the capability approach can contribute to critically thinking on how to design adequate policies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, especially goal 11: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.