In 1995, the Copenhagen Social Summit put the “people’s agenda”
back into the forefront of international policy.
By stressing the interlinked challenges of poverty, unemployment and social exclusion as central to a global social justice strategy, the Social Summit marked a turning point for the multilateral system.
It reinforced the ILO mandate in the world of work and gave new impetus to the promotion of core labour standards.
At the Summit, 117 Heads of State and Government gathered to “acknowledge that the people of the world have shown in different ways an urgent need to address profound social problems, especially poverty, unemployment and social exclusion, that affect every country. It is our task to address both their underlying and structural causes and their distressing consequences in order to reduce uncertainty and insecurity in the life of people”.
For the first time, the international community at the highest political level committed itself to the eradication of poverty as a global objective and called on each country to propose its own national poverty reduction target.
No longer was the focus on poverty alleviation – improving things around the margins. Copenhagen put the spotlight on poverty eradication – getting to the heart of the problem and fixing it. The Copenhagen Summit also made a crucial link between poverty eradication, full employment and gender equality.
Since 1995, the United Nations family has increasingly reoriented its development approach to focus on poverty reduction, paying particular regard to the feminization of poverty. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) broadened its human development approach to supplement sole reliance on income and gross domestic product (GDP) growth as a measure. In 1997, the World Bank began its departure from the much criticized “Washington Consensus” formula and launched a new Comprehensive Development Framework with a greater focus on debt relief and poverty reduction.
The Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also moved in the same direction.
At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, the world’s political leaders committed the community of nations to a concerted, coordinated drive to reduce and eventually eliminate extreme poverty.
Following the Summit, United Nations agencies collectively identified a concise set of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 18 targets and more than 40 indicators to measure progress in their implementation.
These eight goals – eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a Global Partnership for Development – have become an important tool for cooperation in support of national policies to reduce and eliminate poverty, in particular, the target of halving extreme poverty by 2015.
The whole United Nations system has adopted the MDGs as a focus for activity, agreeing on a core strategy to help countries to meet these goals.
This strategy is composed of four distinct but complementary elements:
operational activities at the country level; advocacy and awareness-raising campaigns (the Millennium Campaign); research activities and identification of the best strategies for meeting the MDGs (the Millennium Project); and monitoring of progress made (global and country levels).
The goals provide a context in which the ILO can raise international awareness on the relevance of the Decent Work Agenda to reducing poverty and social exclusion. The MDGs also create opportunities to highlight the role of the ILO’s tripartite constituency and the added value that decent work brings to the development process. The MDGs will not be achieved if the “community of work” is absent from policy formulation and implementation.
In addition, the Millennium Summit gave priority to decent work and put the focus on youth. Specifically, the MDGs call on us to “develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth”. Furthermore, women’s share of non-agricultural wage employment is used as a key indicator of empowerment. But much more needs to be done to ensure that the indicators used to measure progress reflect the realities of the world of work.
International agencies and donor countries are changing their approach to development to encourage and facilitate a much stronger role for governments of aid-receiving countries. The Poverty Reduction Strategy process initiated by the World Bank and increasingly used by other international and national development agencies responds to a long-standing demand by developing countries to place the main responsibility for policy design and implementation in the hands of the governments of the poorest countries.
The United Nations Development Group is also working to align its planning mechanisms with the poverty reduction strategies set by developing countries. In addition, the new approach encourages governments to consult widely with business and trade unions, parliaments and local authorities and civil society organizations in developing Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).
The notion of wide-ranging national ownership has been well defined in policy papers but is far from being a reality on the ground. The “we know best” attitude of so many international experts is still present, and many governments are still not engaging in a participatory process of consultation.
The ILO’s tripartite constituents should develop strong mechanisms of social dialogue as a vital component of this national ownership process. An important vehicle for this work will be the decent work country programmes developed with ILO assistance. At the global level, the ILO and its constituents should participate actively in the various bodies working on the drive to achieve the MDGs by ensuring that our mandate is fully integrated into a coherent international framework and that the voice of employers’
and workers’ organizations occupies its rightful place. Employers and workers are the engine of the productive process. They know better than most how policies impact on the enterprise and the workplace. They have shown that when social dialogue is effective, it contributes to stability and security for all. Policy-makers concerned with issues such as financial stability and trade liberalization need to develop an understanding of the interconnections between employment growth, rights at work, gender equality, social stability and other macroeconomic and development goals.
Yet power does not shift easily. Progress is far too slow, both in ensuring that coherent national policies receive adequate international financial support and in changing the aid relationship from donor conditionality to citizen accountability. If the poorest people living in the poorest countries were polled today, I do not think the overwhelming majority would have felt any major recent improvement in their lives. Our challenge is to focus our resources on ways to make the greatest impact as rapidly as possible. The opportunity cost of going slow is to prolong widespread human suffering.
As things stand today, the MDG of reducing extreme poverty by half in 2015 will not be reached. There is a perverse interaction blocking the way:
inequitable national and international income distribution patterns, governance problems from the local to the global level in the public and private spheres, and a model of globalization incapable of stopping the growth of unemployment and the informal economy.
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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