The Abidjan School and Louis-Joseph Lebret: marrying empirical research and development ethics

ABSTRACT The Abidjan School is a school of thought that developed in the 1980s and 1990s in the Côte d'Ivoire inspired by the work of Louis-Joseph Lebret and Amartya Sen. It follows the empirical approach initiated by Lebret, aimed at better understanding people’s living conditions in order to ethically influence public policies. The Abidjan School has aimed to renew this tradition of empirical analyses of living conditions and better address the ethics of development. A key feature is the combination of economic and anthropological approaches. The School contributed to the redesign of household survey questionnaires, into formats now used in several African countries. It is also part of the renewal of analyses of the person, going beyond Lebret’s personalism.