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1.2 From Copenhagen to the Millennium Declaration: Working Out of Poverty

Written by: International Labour Organization

Article Overview: 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.

1.2 From Copenhagen to the Millennium Declaration: Working Out of Poverty

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.

Related Articles
  1.0 Overview: Working Out of Poverty
  1.4 Our experience: Working Out of Poverty
  4.0 Sustainable pro-poor growth and the governance of the labour market: Working Out of Poverty
  5.15 Conclusions: Working Out of Poverty
  2.9 Conclusions: Working Out of Poverty

Article Tags: core labour standards, development approach, eradication of poverty, feminization of poverty, gdp growth, gender equality, global objective, heart of the problem, ilo mandate, multilateral system, national poverty, poverty alleviation, poverty eradication, poverty reduction, reduction target, social summit, sole reliance, united nations development, united nations development programme, washington consensus



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