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186 united nations ideas changing the world 11. Human Development From Separate Actions to an Integrated Approach • Defining the Concept • Basic Needs: The Precursor • Significance of Human Development for the UN System • Missed Opportunities and Critiques • Conclusion Human development is one of the more innovative and comprehensive of recent UN ideas. The vision of putting “people at the centre of development” has long been a theme of the world organization, but one whose priority and practical importance has waxed and waned.1 The Preamble of the Charter referred to the dignity and worth of the human person, equal rights of men and women, and the need to promote social progress and better standards of living in larger freedom. Human goals were embodied in the articles of association of several of the UN’s specialized agencies. In 1945, the FAO began to pursue the vision of ending hunger in every country. In 1948, UNESCO recommended that primary education be made free and compulsory throughout the world. That same year, the WHO was established to address the health needs of the world’s people; its charter defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The ILO, established in 1919 as part of the League of Nations and then made part of the UN system in 1946, saw its primary focus as improving the conditions and social well-being of workers worldwide. These bold intentions were always present in the UN system but gained traction only in fits and starts. The First Development Decade in 1961 was one such attempt to improve traction and action. The foreword to the Proposals for Action for that decade stated that “development concerns not only man’s material needs but also the improvement of the social conditions of his life and his broad aspirations. Development is not just economic growth, it is growth plus change.”2 Notwithstanding these brave words, the UN failed to develop an integrated intellectual framework for catalyzing a new system-wide approach to economic and social development. human devleopment 187 The first time that an operational and intellectually coherent vision of a people -focused development strategy emerged was in the 1970s, when the ILO’s World Employment Programme developed a strategy for meeting basic needs. This strategy was formulated after a series of interagency missions had comprehensively analyzed problems of employment, poverty, and inequality in a dozen or more countries and made proposals for national and international action to deal with them. Comprehensive employment strategy missions visited seven countries, while regional employment teams mounted missions and undertook analyses of the situation in other countries. Based on the work of the missions and its own research program, the ILO prepared a synthesis that became Employment, Growth and Basic Needs: A One World Problem, the publication for the 1976 World Employment Conference.3 After that conference, the strategy surged to global attention. Meeting basic needs or basic human needs became the dominant development priority, capturing the attention of donors and winning the support of World Bank president Robert McNamara and others in positions of international leadership. In spite of this early and rapid rise to prominence, the basic needs strategy was killed off within five years. Its demise in the early 1980s was the result of a return to economic orthodoxy that was driven by the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the developed countries, the onset of world recession, and banking policies designed to ensure that developing countries repaid their debts. Structural adjustment dominated economic policymaking in Latin America and Africa during the 1980s and much of the 1990s. Structural adjustment priorities became a condition for receiving support from the Bretton Woods institutions but were also reinforced by donors who coordinated their own support around these policies. In 1990, partly in response to this inhospitable environment, the UNDP launched the first annual Human Development Report, which promoted a comprehensive vision and an alternative to neoliberal analysis and policy. The reports of the series brought the concept of human development to worldwide attention andgaveit economicbreadthandphilosophicaldepth.Theyalsoattractedexceptional media attention in both developed and developing countries. In addition to presenting a new paradigm for economic and social development, successive reports expounded the approach in relation to key areas: inequality, public finance, participation, gender, economic growth, consumption, globalization, technology, culture, human rights, and international reform and cooperation. Within a year or two, many individual countries began producing their own human development reports, applying the paradigm...

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