Kellokoski experts' meeting - Background

The challenge of balance and coherence in sustainable development

Poverty eradication has been the primary and overarching objective of international development co-operation for almost 12 years, ever since the World Summit for Social Development (WSSD) in Copenhagen, in 1995. It is a noble goal, and the organisers had no reason or intention to deviate from this goal. However, like many partners worldwide, we had also become convinced about the need to revisit the outcomes of the UN Conference on Environment and Development of Rio de Janeiro (1992) and the Copenhagen Summit for Social Development (1995), respectively.

Rio introduced the concept of sustainable development, and emphasized the need for a balance between the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. In Copenhagen the governments of the world agreed that poverty eradication, full productive employment and social integration are the three most important challenges of development in the world. The Copenhagen Declaration called for a people-centred and equity-oriented approach to meeting the challenges in all these areas.

Since then, the global development community has systematically focused on poverty. Now, in retrospect, we have started to ask ourselves - in all country groupsand international organisations - whether we have isolated poverty too strictly from the other main goals of sustainable development: employment, social integration, sustainable consumption and production patterns, equity, empowerment and a people-centred approach.

Since Copenhagen, there has been a growing international consensus about the multi-dimensionality of the poverty challenge, and about the complementarities between social and economic development. However, the tension between the economic vs. social and environmental approaches to development and poverty eradication has remained a problem, especially as an economistic "growth first" thinking has continued to dominate in the World Bank and the other large development funding institutions, tacitly assuming that equity, gender equality, decent work and sustainability could be achieved only after economic growth has first been achieved. We are convinced that good social and employment policies are an essential ingredient of good economic policy, and vice versa.

Mainstreaming social policy involves recognizing, assessing and drawing on the social dimensions of all policies and programmes, not only on the national, but also on the regional and global levels. This had been the main message of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, co-chaired by President Tarja Halonen of Finland and President Benjamim Mkapa of Tanzania. This had also been the main conclusion of the Arusha Conference on New Frontiers of Social Policy, organised in December 2005 by the World Bank, with funding from Finland, Norway, Sweden and the UK. The Kellokoski Experts' Meeting explicitly aimed at moving forward - as well as complementing in some crucially important ways - the agendas opened by the World Commission and the Arusha Conference.