Social and Environmental Development

Abstract

Under Article 55 of the Charter the United Nations is required to ‘promote higher standards of living, full employment and conditions of economic and social progress and development’. What this has meant in reality is that historically the United Nations has spent a great deal of its time and energy devising, launching and subsequently maintaining programmes whose economic and social content is designed to assist the countries of the developing world where a majority of the world’s population is to be found, often living in conditions of great poverty, hunger, disease or ignorance. Both during and after the Cold War the world has remained divided into rich and poor, advanced and developing or North and South, and the fact of this division colours most aspects of international affairs and is a dominant consideration in the way the United Nations works. The General Assembly may pass resolutions or proclaim a Development Decade but the success of these programmes which are designed to assist the LDCs or the Third World at large must depend upon the willingness of the advanced economies of the North to provide the means to implement them properly as opposed merely to supporting them with lip-service.