About the Lecture

In the same way that students and practitioners of medicine or business or administration need to think and learn about medical/business/administrative ethics, students and practitioners of public policy and of national and local social and economic development need to be sensitive to, and to think hard about, the values and value-choices that are involved: the ethics of development. This talk will give an introduction and overview on ethics and development, using the framework: Why? What? How? – and with many illustrations and space for discussion. It draws on a chapter in Paul Haslam et al. eds., An Introduction to International Development, Oxford University Press (2017); see e.g. https://repub.eur.nl/pub/79125
for a prefinal version.

About the Speaker

Des Gasper is Professor of Human Development, Development Ethics and Public Policy, at the International Institute of Social Studies (The Hague) of Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands). Born in India, he grew up in England, studied economics and international development and then worked for almost a decade in Africa, before settling in the Netherlands. He has travelled widely, including regularly to India. Within public policy he has researched on methods of policy argumentation and policy persuasion (e.g. Arguing Development Policy, Routledge 1996, 2014), on migration (e.g. Transnational Migration and Human Security, Springer 2011), and on climate change. Since the 1980s much of his work has explored themes of ethics and development (e.g. The Ethics of Development, Edinburgh University Press 2004 and Sage India 2005; Development Ethics, Ashgate 2010) including in regard to displacement of people, international cooperation, human rights and human security analysis.