No Small Hope. Towards the Universal Provision of Goods

With headlines focused on human suffering-civil wars, refugee flows, the spread of disease due to hunger and poor sanitation, population growth, climate change-it is easy to dive into despair. What is needed, instead, is a radical rethinking of global policy to realize the potential for improving the human condition.

This book help provides hope by examining the basic needs for a fundamental shift in thinking about development and human security for both practical and ethical reasons. Kenneth A. Reinert calls for a basic goods approach that focuses on the provision of nutritious food, clean water, sanitation, health services, education services, housing, electricity, and human security services. This approach bridges two perspectives: that of standard growth, which emphasizes increasing GDP per capita, andthat of capabilities/human development, which puts priority on the realization of human potential. Reinert argues that only when growth leads to an increase in the broad-based provision of basic goods and services will the hoped-for expansion of human capabilities and development be achieved.

Inshort, basic goods and services are a critical link between growth and human development.No Small Hope: Towards the Universal Provision of Basic Goods places the basic goods approach on the firm foundation of objective human needs and subsistence rights. It offers a practical agenda for making real progress towards human development by focusing on the real determinants of human well-being in an ethical system of moral minimalism. In a world of climate change, increased risk of natural disasters and increased refugee flows, the basic goods approach promises to helpalleviate ongoing suffering and address vast deprivations in basic needs fulfillment.