UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice

11 UN Contributions and Missed Opportunities

276 Outcomes and the Future 276 11 UN Contributions and Missed Opportunities • The Main Contributions of the UN to Development Thinking and Practice • Omissions and Missed Opportunities • Concluding Remarks We have almost come to the end of this volume.Before drawing lessons for the future, let us review where we stand. The contributions of the UN must be neither understated nor overstated. The UN has been an intellectual pioneer in issues of economic and social development, much more than is often recognized . At the same time, there have often been omissions and distortions in its work, as we will try to bring out at the end of this chapter, using the privilege of hindsight to focus on those omissions which we feel have been the most serious . And because this volume is concerned with action and achievements as well as ideas, we also draw attention to some of the cases when the ideas of the UN have been right, but not seriously applied, and one or two cases when the UN was wrong and the ideas it promoted have been neglected or rejected. All this, in principle, could be traced through in painstaking detail, giving attention to ideas and actions country by country over the whole period of the UN’s existence. This is beyond our capacity. We hope that a number of individual countries will document the record of the UN in supporting and influencing their national development. A few countries are already embarking on some part of this important story.1 But in this chapter we give an overview , focusing on the main ideas and attempting to show how they affected the thinking and patterns of development in the main blocs of developing or transition countries. The Main Contributions of the UN to Development Thinking and Practice There can be little doubt that the three greatest intellectual contributions of the United Nations have been human rights on a global scale, purposeful UN Contributions and Missed Opportunities 277 development of developing countries, and ideas for ways to improve economic relations between richer and poorer countries, which initially focused on improving the terms of trade. Over its first three decades, the UN produced many ideas about economic growth and development that focused on national development and living standards but which—if implemented—would have substantively diminished the income gap between rich and poor countries. These early ideas were taken much farther in subsequent decades and broadened into other fields. All were areas where important work was proceeding outside the UN, but in many of these cases, the activities by or within the UN made the major and sometimes the largest contribution.A number of the key architects of the early ideas—Arthur Lewis, Nicholas Kaldor, Richard Stone, Benjamin Higgins, Albert Hirschman—had close links with the UN and for varying periods worked as UN consultants although their main employment was outside the UN. The UN also had a number of distinguished economists working as full-time staff members: Raúl Prebisch, Gunnar Myrdal, James Meade, Hans Singer, and Dudley Seers. Table . gives an overview of the main areas where the UN made contributions to thinking on development. The specifics of these ideas have been elaborated in earlier chapters and will not be repeated here. Rather, the summary below attempts to note which were the areas where the UN contributions seem to have been most pioneering in terms of ideas and which were the areas where UN contributions seem to have had most impact on action. The UN’s most important contributions have been in the areas of human rights and the human dimensions of development, as indicated in Table .. Human rights was the focus of the earliest contributions but further elaboration and implementation of those rights rapidly became points of Cold War controversy.This began to change after the First World Conference on Women in  and the adoption of CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in .Gradually over the s, the awareness of rights and of CEDAW in particular grew internationally. The women’s movement in developing countries grew in strength, helped by CEDAW and often building on the inspiration and networks established in the international conferences, although the potential of these movements was often constrained by the priorities of structural adjustment. In the s, the Convention on the Rights of the Child was influential in drawing more attention to children’s issues, especially concerns about gender inequality and the...