This book makes the case for a critical turn in development thinking around universities and their contributions in making a more equal post-2015 world. It puts forward a normative approach based on human and sustainable development, one which can gain a hearing from policy, scholarship, and practitioners dealing with practical issues of research and knowledge, teaching and learning, and community engagement and service - all key university functions. The book argues that such an approach can elucidate development debates drawing on local, national and international issues and examples to show why higher education matters for the post-2015 agenda both in educational and social terms. It advocates a new arena of engagement with universities as key sites of development in order to challenge current development omissions around university education.
The first part of the book presents the main characteristics of the human and sustainable development approach (HSD) in relation to previous debates. The book explores how HSD could approach the following core ideas: the meaning of well-being, the idea of agency, participation and citizenship, how to address diversity, the relation between local and global, and the idea of equitable partnerships. The second part is a research-based section discussing findings from several research projects in South Africa and Spain. This comparative approach responds to the increasingly blurred distinction between North and South, both of which contain people who are oppressed and exploited, and which is a category that has dominated development discourse. It also shows how the ideas set out in the first part of the book can be operationalized in empirical sites, and how these ideas can work in real world, non-ideal settings, to advance human development and justice.
This book is addressed to researchers and posgraduate students in development studies, university education, the capability approach and human development community.
