In 1995, in Copenhagen, Denmark, the first global UN summit on social development took place. It was five years after the World Bank had put poverty on the international agenda (“We have a dream: a world without poverty”) and five years after the UNDP started its “human development” programme.

There was a lot of enthusiasm around these new plans since the “structural adjustment” that the Bretton Woods institutions were imposing on debt-ridden poor countries had caused a real social disaster. Public companies were privatised and millions of workers lost their jobs, public services disappeared and added extra work for women, and the informal sector grew at a fast rate. With the addition of the emerging globalisation, it was easy to see that, once again, social development had been abandoned.

The new programmes meant new hope, even if it soon became clear that the World Bank’s “poverty focus” was only meant to further dismantle existing social policies and that the UNDP did not propose social policies for the whole of society either. The focus was on poor people, the only social responsibility of States and governments according to the new ideology.

Social development according to the UN

It is obvious that the UN was not able to totally escape this new poverty focus that was becoming the new “order of discourse” of the 21st century. The ILO, after a decade of powerless weakening, also had to adapt its policies focusing on fundamental labour rights and “decent work”. Nevertheless, it adopted a declaration on social justice and later a recommendation on “social protection floors”.

The UN Summit on social development did go a bit further than the Bretton Woods institutions. It had three main chapters that focused on poverty, employment, and social integration. It was a very welcome broadening of the global agenda as it existed in the 90s, even if it did not go as far as the UN Declaration of 1969 on development and social progress and the ILO convention on social security of 1952.

Furthermore, the UNDP was tasked with the coordination of UN activities consequent to the Social Summit. It decided it would focus on … poverty as its major priority and try to integrate the two other topics into this dominant new goal.

In 2000, at the UN Millennium Summit, the Millennium Goals were adopted, stating that extreme poverty should be reduced by half by 2015, compared to 1990. This goal was met, but mainly thanks to China and India. In Africa, the number of extremely poor people was higher in 2015 than it was in 1990.

The Sustainable Development Goals followed in 2015, combining social and environmental goals, including even a chapter on inequality. However, it has to be noted that this “inequality” repeats the goals already mentioned at the beginning of the 1970s, i.e., that the poorest 40% of the global population experiences faster growth than the rest of society. It means inequality has to be reduced looking only downwards. The rich do not have to contribute. Don’t look up!

This is where we stand today.

The world is not in a good shape

Whether one looks at the latest World Bank documents or the World Social Situation Report of the UN for 2024, one cannot escape the awareness that social development did not take off at all in the past decades.

Extreme poverty in the world did diminish, but as it has been said already, mainly thanks to China and India. In Africa, there are still many countries with extreme poverty above 50%.

According to the World Bank, there are now around 700 million extremely poor people in the world living on less than 2.15 US$ a day. “Around 3.5 billion people live on less than $6.85 a day, the poverty line more relevant for middle-income countries, which are home to three-quarters of the world’s population. Without drastic action, it could take decades to eradicate extreme poverty and more than a century to eliminate poverty as it is defined for nearly half of the world.” In other words, we are seriously off-track. Moreover, still according to the World Bank, reducing poverty in middle-income countries would seriously harm the environmental agenda because it would contribute to rising CO2 emissions.

Add to all this the unbearable debt burden of poor countries, diminishing aid budgets, and slow growth and it is clear that once again, “development” is far behind all repeated promises.

The way forward

A couple of conclusions have to be repeated in order to change the order of things.

First, while helping poor people is obviously a moral and political duty, one should never forget that the poverty agenda is perfectly compatible with neoliberalism. The idea behind this is that all those who are out of poverty should buy income and health insurance on the private market.

Secondly, if one believes in the idea(l) of “development”–and not its practice of the past decades–promoting autonomy and emancipation for all, one inevitably has to question the relevance of these policies. Neo- and post-colonialism pervaded all “aid” agendas, globalisation was based on inequality and debt management was clearly designed to maintain and strengthen the hegemony of global powers.

Thirdly, if one looks at the policies that were put into place to ‘“fight poverty”, at the development ideologies behind the Bretton Woods initiatives and the lack of “aid” despite all promises, serious arguments emerge to question the political will to “eradicate poverty” and to “promote development”. Just think of one country, China, which really did develop and eradicate extreme poverty and how it is sanctioned today by several rich countries.

Fourthly, there are ways to escape the impasse. Countries of the South themselves have proposed alternative policies since their independence in the 1960s. The UN General Assembly has adopted many interesting resolutions along with other adjustments. The many UN conferences of the past decades have launched several good ideas that were, time and again, blocked by a powerful group of rich countries.

It is very interesting and positive to see that new initiatives are now once again on the table to redefine the “right to development” and the “new international economic order”.

We are living in an era of shifting geopolitical relationships, in which countries of the South (think of BRICS) are trying to once again impose alternative agendas. We do not know how the wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe will end, but it seems clear that they will contribute to a “different Europe” and a “different Middle East”. Wars in Africa and changing alliances in the Sahel and Western Africa are also preparing for major changes.

Social development

This is the context in which two major UN summits will take place. The first is the 4th Financing for Development Conference in Sevilla in July. It will give a clear indication of what rich countries are still willing to contribute to help poorer countries.

The second global conference will be the one on social development that takes place in November in Doha, Qatar.

Preparations have started with the two coordinating countries, Morocco and Belgium.

While all UN summits necessarily start from what has already been achieved in the past, it can also be very positive to start from what should be the fundamental principles of social development.

If one looks at Maslov’s pyramid of human needs, one sees first of all the physiological needs, which clearly can be identified as what today’s poor people lack: food, housing, and clothes.

But the second stage is as fundamental as the first one: security and safety or, in other words, protection. This is the major reason anti-poverty policies can never be enough. All people, wherever and however they live, need protection. If one believes in what is called “social development”, this protection cannot be given by the military or by the police in a “strong State”, but will necessarily have to come from economic and social rights, that is to say, from economic and social policies that protect all people whether they are poor or not, working or not.

In other words, what is needed is a very broad concept of social protection and social justice, with decent work and labour rights, public services, health insurance, pensions, family allowances, and yes, specific assistance to poor people. This is the only civilised way to achieve what all people want: social justice that services people, safety, and security instead of the economy.

It should be clear that these policies can never be put into place without fair tax systems and without economic policies that really give opportunities to all. A lot has already been done in that respect with interesting work carried out at a global level on social and solidarity economy and on commons.

Social development is indeed the way forward in order to abandon the perverse and failed neoliberal ideology, to re-install a belief in solidarity and universalism with respect for diversity. There will never be one single social policy for the whole world. The task of a global summit should be to define the fundamental universal principles and then leave it to different regions, countries, and municipalities to make it concrete, taking into account the needs and wishes of local populations.

Today we live in poverty factories that urgently have to close. Poverty can never be justified in our rich world.

One final point. If social development can take care of the basic needs of people and of the safety and security of the whole of society, with economic and social rights, it directly contributes to peace and social justice.

So this is my wish for the social summit: that these two points already present in former UN resolutions and declarations be put at the forefront: peace and social justice.