Development As a Complex ISSUE and the Challenge of Multidisciplinary

Development is tradicionally a concept connected to economic growth which could be measured by economic standards such as Gross Domestic Produt or Per Capita Income. In this sense development emerged as an economic concept studied by the Economics, specially the Welfare Economics. This means that development was studied within a single scientific domain, according to its methods and its terminology, which makes things easier for the researchers but at the same time allows scientists to a partial and limited view of the problem. This concept of development was questioned within the Economics by authors who noticed that both GDP and PCI focus on resources only and do not consider how the real people make use of these resources. At the same time development became a central concept in the international politics, to a point when the United Nations Organization put out a declaration of the right of development, so it became a political, ethical and legal concept as well as an economic one. So nowadays it is mandatory that development should be studied under a multidisciplinar point of view able to understand both its material (e.g., Economics) and immaterial (e.g., Ethics) elements. This research claims that this multidisciplinar approach can be enlighted by Complex Systems Science at least in two different ways. First, since development is a state of affairs that emerge from the interaction of different agents in different domains such as politics, economics, law, science an so, a systemic vision might be useful to understand the differences and the relations among these different systems. Second, since development can be understood as a proccess of elimination of unfreedom by increasing capabilities of individuals, focused on the agency aspect of people (e.g., Amartya Sen), a science that is used to deal with agents and agency can be specially helpful.