Book excerpt: Most current social welfare policies aim to ameliorate immediate problems or injustices, but they do little to foster human development or support the potential of people within marginalized communities. How can we more effectively use public policy to foster human development? How can we overcome the injustice of contemporary society and give people across the social and class spectrum equal opportunities to flourish? Capability-Promoting Policies offers case studies and analyses of a number of different existing approaches to these questions, presenting newly conceptualized strategies for developing and implementing effective policies for fostering human development at the local, national, and international levels.