Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen to be first guest in a new UNDP series of talks on the Future of Development

New York : United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) will kick off a new series of quarterly dialogues with a conversation between Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner on Thursday, 12 November 2020 at 12pm EST. The Future of Development series will serve as a platform to exchange ideas and promote concrete recommendations for  more impactful collaboration between development leaders.

Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Amartya Sen was paramount in the formulation of the annual Human Development Report, which is published by UNDP and now marks its 30th anniversary. Sen has introduced the concept of development as human freedom and contributed to expanding the international community’s thinking on development—going beyond economic measures to ways of empowering people to realize their full potential.

“I’m honoured to welcome Prof. Amartya Sen as our inaugural guest for this series of dialogues,” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator. “As the world faces today’s increasingly complex and multidimensional development challenges, ranging from the global pandemic to the climate crisis, it is a privilege to revisit the way development has been conceptualized, understood and measured – and where we go from here.”

While the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic’s public health and socioeconomic impacts is yet to be fully grasped, many of the social, economic, and political insecurities have been exposed with the spread of the coronavirus. Furthermore, the rapid and universal spread of the virus is not only dialing back the development progress to date, but also questioning globalization and multilateral engagements more broadly.

The dialogues present an opportunity to reflect on the international community’s collective role in advancing global agendas for sustainable development through frank and critical conversations.