Previous      Next        Contents

UNRISD News Number 20

Spring/Summer 1999

ESSENTIAL MATTER

UNRISD and Follow-Up to the Social Summit

In March 1995, participants in the World Summit for Social Development recognized the growing seriousness of poverty, unemployment and social disintegration and endorsed an ambitious and comprehensive Programme of Action to address these problems. What concrete steps have been taken since then to implement such commitments?

During the past three years, UNRISD has organized two large public conferences to encourage the exchange of up-to-date information on major initiatives taken by governments, international agencies and civil society organizations to further the Summit Programme of Action.¹

After the Social Summit: Implementing the Programme of Action, held five months after Copenhagen, reported on steps being taken in various sectors to implement the Summit commitments, and highlighted problems arising at this early stage of work. The conference stressed the need for institutional responsibility on the part of the United Nations and governments if Summit goals were to be met, and warned against exaggerated expectations that non-governmental organizations and other civil society institutions could act as guarantors of the implementation process.

The second conference, Advancing the Social Agenda: Two Years after Copenhagen, was held in July 1997. It again assessed progress in implementation of Summit goals and explored promising approaches to some key issues of social cohesion. It was suggested that, while certain initiatives were indeed resulting in meaningful advances at the local and national levels, responses at the international level were not adequate for these to gain any real momentum on a global scale. Economic globalization continued to gather steam. Meanwhile, people's organizations around the world were creating their own solutions to the problems that the international community sought to address at the Summit. Civil society organizations confronted a dilemma: if they sought to expand or scale-up their efforts, they risked becoming the mirror image of large bureaucratic institutions. If they limited themselves only to the local or regional level, their efforts remained fragmented.

Such findings highlighted the importance of the framework, or "enabling environment", in which follow-up to the Social Summit takes place. This environment is described in Commitment 1 of the Summit Programme of Action: "We commit ourselves to creating an economic, political, social, cultural and legal environment that will enable people to achieve social development".

Copenhagen Plus Five
In preparation for Copenhagen Plus Five, UNRISD will focus on Commitment 1, generating broad debate in five areas of policy and institutional reform that are central to creating an enabling environment for social progress. These include initiatives in the following areas:

• financing social development;
• promoting democratization and public sector reform;
• mainstreaming gender in public policy;
• strengthening civil society organizations;
• and integrating concepts of people-centred sustainable development in planning and project implementation.

In each thematic area, analysts will explore the socio-economic and political conditions that facilitate progress, and key constraints and tensions that impede it. Articles in this special edition of UNRISD News highlight some of the topics to be discussed in this Institute programme. Commissioned studies will be published in an UNRISD Occasional Paper Series for Copenhagen Plus Five, and will be distributed both at the April 2000 Preparatory Committee meeting in New York and on-line through the UNRISD Web site.

Finally, these and other inputs will be synthesized in an Institute report for Copenhagen Plus Five. The report entitled Taking Global Responsibility for Social Development: Policy Reform and Institutional Change in the 1990s, will be presented at an international conference in Geneva in June 2000, at the time of the special General Assembly sessions to evaluate progress in implementing the Copenhagen Programme of Action.

1 Both conference reports are available on the Institute Web site and in print. After the Social Summit: Implementing the Programme of Action, Report of the UNRISD Seminar (Geneva, 4 July 1995), UNRISD, Geneva, September 1995; and Advancing the Social Agenda: Two Years after Copenhagen, Report of the UNRISD Public Meeting (Geneva, 9-10 July 1997), UNRISD, Geneva, November 1997.

Previous      Next        Contents