The development debate - UN member countries

Can development be the same for all?

Has the United Nations contributed to development in its fifty years of existence and if so, to what kind of development? What role can we expect to see it play in this field in the coming years?

In a short article it is scarcely possible to present a complete assessment(1). To do so would, for a start, be a technically challenging undertaking: how could precise demarcation lines be drawn between action in support of development and other related fields such as international security, human rights, humanitarian activities or many specific areas such as childhood, food, labour and health? It is difficult, if not impossible, to give an overall picture of activities that are many-sided and complex and are carried out by a large number of specialized agencies and programmes.

Another difficulty in the way of this assessment is that it is the subject of heated controversy: given that development results from a political process rather than from mere technocratic know-how, it entails choices between different objectives and arbitration between different interest groups, and hence a constant interplay of power relationships, ideological confrontations and negotiating strategies.

An uneven track record

I should like to emphasize four points.

Firstly, the challenge of meeting the overall demands of development on a worldwide scale is an enormous one, made even greater by recent political and economic upheavals. No organization is capable of meeting that challenge single-handed in a satisfactory way. The question thus arises: should the role of an international organization be limited to a few day-to-day management tasks, or can it be expected to come up with the new ideas and carry out the changes that such a challenge calls for? The initial temptation, as regards the second half of the question, would be to answer no, but that would be to overlook the conceptual and methodological value of ideas recently put forward by the United Nations such as "sustainable" development, "human" development and "social" development - even if the uses to which these concepts have so far been put fall short of the potential they represent.

Secondly, in the matter of development, the United Nations has served as an arena for dialogue and confrontation between North and South. Confrontation has, however, had the upper hand over dialogue, and has proved fruitless: either the end result has been incompatible sets of demands, as was the case of the debates surrounding the "New International Economic Order" in the 1970s, or poorly presented and inappropriate demands have been repeatedly put forward, as was the case with increased public aid to development, which was supposed to have reached 0.7 per cent of donor countries' GNP but still stands at half that rate!

As to the confrontation between the capitalist and socialist theories of development, no serious debate on the subject ever took place, with the very regrettable result that simplistic conceptions of the role of market forces now hold sway.

Thirdly, the weak point of the United Nations is that it has never had a proper body of principles as regards development. It has always fallen into line with the viewpoints of the financial institutions, which are themselves dominated by neoclassical orthodoxy and the vested interests of the North, albeit with a few of the demands of the South, irreconcilable as they are with that orthodoxy, thrown in for good measure. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) itself long felt compelled to mimic the principles and outlook of the World Bank, which accounts for the incoherent nature of the "development decades" and suchlike solemnly proclaimed events.

Fourthly, this being the case, it comes as no surprise to see the very uneven quality of the development activities of the United Nations, not only regarding population, the environment or children but also in the fields of structural adjustment, industrialization, food and international trade. This uneven track record, partly inevitable though it may be, is particularly regrettable since the United Nations has shown on many occasions that it is capable of doing excellent work in these fields, work that is now more than ever needed.

Making the UN a more global organization

How could performance be improved in the future? The record shows serious shortcomings that can only be put right by means of a comprehensive overhaul of the entire United Nations system. The primary need is to take steps to make it a truly global organization.

This means, in the first place, allowing the major players in the development process to be more fairly represented at the world level. The United Nations cannot go on letting a minority of states, albeit the richest ones, hold the financial and monetary levers of development in their hands, as they do today. The institutional solution is not, however, an easy one: the richest countries cannot be required to provide most of the funding for organizations over whose decisions they have no control.

Next, the new organization must be able to act in an integrated and coherent manner upon all the dimensions of development and not be limited to only some of them, as was seen to be the case during the preparations for the Copenhagen Summit for social development. The view was expressed on that occasion that the United Nations should specialize in "social" development and leave the economic aspects of development to other bodies. Such a break-up would be both absurd and disastrous, especially as one of the most urgent tasks for thinking and planning in relation to development is that of integrating its economic, social and political dimensions(2). It is a task the United Nations cannot shirk.

Lastly, such an organization should understand the expression "development" as encompassing a much wider range of social needs than just the need, as set forth in the model that prevails today, for access to greater and greater consumption of goods. Not only must the structures of production and consumption that characterize growth be reconsidered; we must also accept pluralism in the definition of development, of the elements of which it is composed, of the way in which it is shared out, and of the models of social organization upon which it depends - in political terms, a much harder task.

These reforming ideas have far-reaching implications. They confer upon the United Nations a power of arbitration in the allocation of collective resources to the satisfaction of needs that are considered, world-wide, as having priority, such as the reduction of the least acceptable forms of physical deprivation or social oppression, the banning of trade in certain weapons or the protection of the basic conditions for the survival of the ecosystem, whether or not these needs meet the criteria of the dominant economic approach.

Thus enlarged, the conception of the role of the United Nations runs the obvious risk of suffering from the same lack of realism as has marked the Organization in the past - one need only think back to the grandiloquent declarations about the "right of all peoples to self-determination" or the "right of all people to health by the year 2000". The risk is a double one: on the one hand, the danger is that the political and social basis for defining these priorities will be lacking; and on the other, an even worse danger, that a cosmetic consensus will be arrived at around a few general objectives to which nobody is committed.

This lack of realism could, however, be avoided by sticking to precise, specific commitments, entailing well-defined strategies and resources. I shall cite two examples.

The first relates to international trade. In this field, the prevailing model imposes a specific orientation on all countries through the action of the Bretton Woods institutions and the GATT(3) accords, in particular the fullest possible integration of national economies into international trade in accordance with the often obscure rule of "comparative advantages". The social costs of this narrow, mercantile conception of development have, alas, been proven beyond all doubt, yet the United Nations has never made any serious attempt to reverse it.

The second relates to the new ways of funding development and in particular to the role that a world-wide taxation system might play. This idea, recently taken up by the United Nations Development Programme(4), has the advantage of being relatively painless while potentially bringing in considerable resources. A much clearer commitment by the United Nations, or by a renovated world organization, to such a scheme would doubtless be much more effective than any number of generous-sounding but empty speeches.

The task of thinking these questions out and, in particular, of making specific proposals is going ahead, but remains inadequate and needs to be tackled more thoroughly. The stakes are high. It is not a matter of promising a "radiant future" but, by trying to eradicate certain unacceptable factors, of ensuring the survival of the present world.

1 See L'ONU (The UN) by Maurice Bertrand, published by La Decouverte (Paris, 1994) in its "Reperes" series. The present article draws heavily on this work, which presents a critical overview of the complex working of the United Nations.

2 See in particular Pour un developpement social different: recherche d'une methode d'approche, the report of a working group for the UN Conference on Social Development held in March 1995 in Copenhagen (Institut universitaire d'etudes du developpement, Geneva, July 1994).

3 GATT: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now being replaced by the World Trade Organization (Ed.).

4 Human Development Report 1994, United Nations Development Programme, Oxford University Press, New York, 1994.

CHRISTIAN COMELIAU, of France, is a Professor and Deputy Director of Research at the University Institute of Development Studies (IUED) in Geneva. His publications include Les Relations Nord-Sud (La Decouverte publishers, Paris, 1991).

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