Social Policy in a Development Context: The Case of Peru

During the last half century ideas of how to bring about development have changed and evolved.1 Over the course of the past twenty years, development theory and practice has stressed institutional and social aspects, including poverty reduction, the efficiency of public policies, democratic governance, and conflict prevention and resolution. The World Bank dedicated its 1990 World Development Report to poverty, and the following year, in an evaluation of the development experience of the preceding forty years (World Bank, 1991), it established new concerns for multilateral development banks about the relation between social development and social policies in opposition to ‘structural adjustment policies’. UNDP proposed the concept of ‘sustainable human development’ as an attempt to integrate economic growth, social development, and environment conservation (Speth, 1994). More recently, Amartya Sen has conceived development as a process of expanding human capacities, thereby reintroducing moral and ethical aspects to development policies. From this perspective, access to goods and services are intermediate means of exercising human freedom and choosing different ways of living (Sen, 1999).