Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations
From the perspective of increased international/global responsibility for the financing of social development, would it be more feasible and constructive to work first on the design and implementation of a global/nternational system for financing efforts to achieve a specific objective identified in the Millennium texts, such as the reduction of child mortality?
Second meeting of the Forum Cooperation for Social Development: The International DimensionTheme 1: How does international cooperation contribute to the social development of developing countries? For the past several years, the agenda of international cooperation for development has been dominated by the issue of poverty eradication. The United Nations system is mobilized for the achievement of one of the primary objectives identified in the United Nations Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals, which is "to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water". * The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, added a comparable target relating to sanitation. In 1999, the lnternational Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank launched the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers initiative, through which low-income countries develop their own comprehensive strategies for poverty reduction; each Paper is to incorporate an assessment of the country's poverty situation and a framework for domestic policies and external cooperation and assistance, representing a crucial link between national public actions, donor support and the development outcomes aimed for in the Millennium Development Goals. At a more general level, four of the ten commitments incorporated in the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development explicitly mention social development. lnternational cooperation comes in many forms and encompasses a broad range of objectives and actions focusing on different aspects of social development in developing countries. Examples include the agreements concluded by the IMF with Governments facing financial difficulties; the humanitarian assistance provided to the victims of natural disasters and other humanitarian emergencies; the technical assistance provided in a multitude of domains including human rights and public administration; the efforts to address the spread of major epidemic diseases such as HIVIAIDS; and the interventions of the lnternational Labour Organization (ILO), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in their respective areas of competence. Millennium Declaration, para. 19; and targets 1 and 2 under the first Millennium Development Goal.