UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice

7 The 1990s: Rediscovering a Human Vision

169 7 The 1990s: Rediscovering a Human Vision • The Development Context • Human Rights and Development • National and Global Governance • Human Development: A New Integrating Framework? • The Impact of World Conferences • Concluding Observations For development, the s were years of backlash, adjustment, and public relations. Some efforts were made to rein in the extremes of policy prescriptions of the s and strike a balance with the concerns and approaches that had dominated development policy in the preceding decades. There was a strong and widespread upsurge of interest in human rights and good governance . The UN made an effort to regain some of its lost authority as a leading force in development, primarily by convening a series of international conferences on some of the most critical social and economic problems facing the peoples of the world. In , the Secretary-General published An Agenda for Peace1 and three years later An Agenda for Development.2 This chapter addresses human rights and good governance. It considers the links between human rights and development, the emerging issues relating to governance, and efforts made in the UN system to provide a unifying framework through its work on human development. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the contribution made by the UN world conferences in building a blueprint for goals, strategies, and policies for global social and economic development in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The Development Context The context for UN initiatives in the s was set by three major developments —the end of the Cold War, the upsurge of globalization, and reaction to the lost decade of the s, which had exacerbated the problems of poverty in 170 Ideas and Action most countries of the developing world. Each of these had direct repercussions for development policy. The collapse of the communist states in Europe dealt serious blows to what remained of development doctrines that emphasized the role of central planning , nonprice mechanisms for resource allocation, and state ownership of enterprises.The obvious failures of central planning in the former Soviet Union boosted the neoliberal agenda of the Washington Consensus.3 Second, the end of the Cold War further eroded the declining influence of the developing countries, as the great powers no longer felt the need to court their support. Among other consequences, this reinforced the decline in development assistance , belying the hopes of those who expected that some dividends from the disarmament process would flow into development assistance. On the positive side, interest in issues of human rights and democracy revived. The acceleration in globalization was in part the intensification of trends that had been under way in the preceding decades. But the revolution in information technology and communications and striking advances in capital mobility, trade liberalization, and internationalization of production made it a qualitatively different phenomenon. Globalization represented an opportunity to increase the pace of social and economic progress in some countries and a threat of marginalization in others.Over the s,inequalities between the richest and poorest countries—and between the world’s richest and poorest peoples—soared, creating gaps between the fortunate minority and the deprived majority which were both gargantuan and grotesque.4 Measures to deal with these gaps were not even on the agenda, but growing awareness spurred renewed efforts to deal with world poverty. The lost decade of the s was a major setback to development not only in Latin America but also in Africa and the Middle East. The list of adversely affected countries was further lengthened in the s by catastrophic economic and social trends in most of the former centrally planned countries in Europe and the Soviet Union. Increasing impoverishment and deprivation raised serious doubts about the efficacy of neoliberal policies to promote broad-based growth.5 There was a renewal of interest in strategies for poverty reduction and human development that led to a series of world conferences in the s dealing with the welfare and development of children, the environment ,human rights,population,social development, equality for women, habitat, and nutrition. These conferences went farther than those of the s in forging the links between their various themes and development. They also sought a synthesis between neoliberal ideas and poverty-reduction strategies. Thus, the declarations of principle and programs of action adopted at these conferences gave The 1990s 171 Box 7.1. Ghana The development experience of Ghana over the past fifty years is a...