Towards a systemic development approach: Building on the Human-Scale Development paradigm

Since its inception, the scope of inquiry within modern economics has been overall reduced to the chrematistic, market-centred dimension of the economic process. This has been reflected in the very way it shaped the modern idea of development which, more and more, has been represented in monetary terms to the point of being equated to chrematistic growth altogether. This reductionism has been severely criticized for various reasons, mostly related to the ignorance of the complex, multidimensional, social, cultural and psychological motives and aspirations of human beings, ignoring as well crucial environmental and ecological dimensions within and by means of which the economic process unfolds. One fundamental early contribution to the re-conceptualization of the economic development process in terms of well-being from a systemic perspective came about with the Human-Scale development approach (H-SD) in the 1980s. Central to this paradigm is a systemic re-conceptualization of human needs and an attempt to place this discussion at the centre of the development debate. It suggested a recovery of the oikonomy in its original classical meaning, as a means for achieving better well-being beyond the chrematistics narrow scope. This theory presents a very wide outlook for its theoretical and practical applications and in this paper we will try to build on H-SD's original contribution. We begin this by briefly outlining what can be termed the chrematistic turn within both modern economics' theory and practice at the dawn of modern capitalism. In the second section the main aspects of the H-SD approach are briefly presented and discussed. The last sections are devoted to propose some methodological extensions to the original H-SD version suggesting innovative ways of enlarging its scope through the development and improvement of its evaluation tools. Thereby we hope to enhance its application within its traditional context as well as indicating means for applying it to other fields as development policies, strategies or eventually, appraisal of new technologies.