Driving Change for Sustainable Human Development

Why is it difficult for us to change? Driving change for Sustainable Human Development, is the new publication of the emblematic UNDP report in Chile, almost a decade after its last edition (2015).

Why is it difficult for us to change? Why are changes long demanded by citizens and whose need is supported by expert knowledge? Answering such questions is part of the objectives of this Report on Human Development in Chile 2024. These are questions that refer to a key challenge to advance towards Sustainable Human Development in the country: to take advantage of the opportunities that Chile provides, it is urgently necessary to carry out the pending changes and anticipate the challenges.

The Report proposes that the country's current difficulty in carrying out the required transformations is linked to the insufficient capacities of Chilean society to bring about social change. It defines the social management of change as a collective effort that is not reduced to the will of political leaders. It includes a complex constellation of relationships and factors that interact mutually, although not always in a coherent way.

In this sense, the social management of changes has a relational nature, since its success or failure depends on the relationship between social actors (elites, social movements, and citizens), which in turn are conditioned by subjectivities (e.g., the emotions that people associate with recent changes), public discourses (e.g., those referring to proposals for change) and institutions (for example, the electoral system or the rules of free competition).