Two authors who have been leaders of the "social quality approach" that
emerged in European social policy circles in the 1990s, and two authors who
have worked with the "human development" and "human security" approaches
that emerged in international development policy circles in the 1980s and 90s,
collaborate in this paper in order to outline and compare the two traditions.
The "human development" tradition has focused on the quality of individual
human lives, understood as influenced by interconnections that transcend
conventional disciplinary boundaries; its "human security" branch goes deeper
into study of human vulnerability and the textures of daily life. The "social
quality" tradition tries to understand individual lives as lived within a societal
fabric, to identify and measure key elements of that fabric, and to develop a
correspondingly grounded public policy approach. The paper is a first step in a
project to assess the possible complementarity, in theorising and practical
application, of these two streams of work