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2024 Handbook

Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)

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The Economic and Social Council is the principal United Nations organ responsible for coordinating economic, social and related works of 14 specialized agencies, 10 functional commissions and five regional commissions. ECOSOC accepts reports and recommendations from other United Nations bodies, including the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. Along with its coordinating role, ECOSOC gathers information and advises Member States on economic, social, humanitarian and human rights programs. ECOSOC also coordinates and collaborates with autonomous specialized agencies that work closely with the United Nations. These organizations include multilateral financial and trade institutions, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

Empowering people and ensuring inclusiveness and equality Empowering people and ensuring inclusiveness and equality

Empowering people and ensuring inclusiveness and equality can play an integral role in addressing world inequality. Environmental degradation, uneven progress in economic development and processes that disempower people and communities are concerns of the United Nations. The Economic and Social Council notes that under unfettered market conditions and poor institutional frameworks, global economic development and technological advancement can become sources of exclusion and inequality. Economic systems oriented towards maximizing growth for limited stakeholders, including resource endowments accompanied by policies that may translate into costs and losses for recipient nations, generate cycles of inequality and restrict adequate resource distribution to secure the well-being of all people. These systems tend to perpetuate the inability of many to exercise their rights and limit the capacity of governments to implement policies that improve the lives of all people. Strong multilateral systems that require adequate representation of countries at all levels of development will aid in addressing immediate challenges and long‐term social, environmental and financial sustainability and human rights. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides the most recent pledge of the United Nations to leave no one behind. While the goals and targets set by the 2030 Agenda are instrumental in the generations of policy, the indicators of success risk a narrow focus on measurements of inequality that do not reflect the impacts of systems with a concentration of wealth at the top.

Since its founding in 1945, the United Nations and United Nations Charter stressed the need for solving economic and humanitarian problems and, in 1948, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, affirming the United Nations’ commitment to freedom, equality, dignity and human rights for all people. The United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights laid the foundation and established a standard for social and economic development policies. United Nations Member States made considerable efforts to particularly advance economic development by forming regional economic commissions to initiate and facilitate collaborative actions towards collective progress. In early actions, the United Nations treated economic development and social advancement as independent goals. In 1957, the General Assembly created the Special Fund to help provide systematic and sustained assistance for the technical, economic and social development of countries in need of development support. Due to the expansion of the United Nations, visibility around issues of development grew. In 1961, the United Nations General Assembly designated 1960-1970 as the first United Nations Development Decade, urging Member States to intensify mobilization and support of efforts directed towards self-sustaining economic growth and social advancement for all people. Seeking to address urgent developmental concerns, the United Nations focused on reducing world hunger through international action led by the Food and Agriculture Organization and in 1961, established the World Food Programme to enhance financial resources to make surplus food available in the fight against hunger in least developed countries.

Further recognizing the need to join economic efforts and social empowerment and address discrimination to achieve a better quality of life for all, in 1973, the United Nations General Assembly declared the Decade for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination, prompting Member States to implement a program addressing the obstacles faced by oppressed people specifically in territories under colonial governance. In 1981, the United Nations General Assembly designated the Third United Nations Development Decade, positioning human rights frameworks to address security and the creation of conducive environments for disarmament and the successful pursuit of development. Ten years later, the United Nations Development Programme launched the first Human Development Report, promoting the engagement of people’s choices and making development more democratic and participatory. The Human Development Report identified gaps in previous United Nations development efforts, noting that while economic growth was necessary, developing countries possessed the capacity to refocus on substantially addressing issues of poverty, inequality, food security and education.

In 2000, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, identifying the shared responsibility of upholding human dignity and equality principles. The Millennium Declaration brought together the past efforts of the United Nations and launched the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a transformative agenda with targets set for 2015 to meet the needs of the world’s poorest through collaboration between governments, civil society and other partners. In line with the established MDGs, the United Nations General Assembly created UN Women in 2010, a United Nations entity dedicated to addressing gender equality and the empowerment of women. While the implementation efforts of the MDGs identified vulnerabilities for developing countries including wealth disparities, gaps in educational access and varying impacts of climate change, they struggled to address discrepancies in implementation efforts for countries with high initial levels of poverty to make the same relative degree of progress as countries with lower initial levels of poverty. Least developed countries faced significant challenges in accessing international development assistance. Macroeconomic challenges, such as weakness in public sector financial management practices and policies, created obstacles in obtaining concessional loans. The United Nations hosted the UN Sustainable Development Summit and adopted Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development following the expiration of the MDGs in 2015. The agenda set the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as targets for countries to end global poverty, build a life of dignity for all and leave no one behind. The SDGs prompted governments to move towards systemic and holistic approaches that aligned with integrated United Nations policy support, more substantial synergies between development and humanitarian efforts and ensuring accountability and transparency from national governments.

Although globalization and industrialization have generated unprecedented economic and social progress, they continue to drive exclusion and inequality and stall progress on the targets set by the SDGs by hindering access to technology and necessary support for the achievement of inclusion and global equality in developing regions. The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed these gaps where disparities in technological advancements, limited financial means to invest in digital learning and unaffordable internet access widened the discrepancies in educational access for children in poorer economies. Additionally, limited global capacity for vaccine creation and distribution prolonged the impacts of the pandemic in developing countries, exacerbated by delayed access to patents and lower manufacturing capacity. While income inequality between countries has seen improvement, income inequality within countries has declined. The absence of adequate social protections, gender inequality, climate change and environmental degradation force more vulnerabilities on people and aid in enriching individuals at the expense of collective duties and mutual obligations, posing a threat to growing efforts around empowering people and ensuring inclusiveness and equality. For the successful implementation of development strategies, the United Nations needs solutions that encourage the elimination of barriers that undermine human rights and promote the empowerment and inclusion of people furthest behind.

Questions to Consider from Your Government’s Perspective: 

  • How can the United Nations ensure that people most affected by climate change are included in the solution building and decision making process?
  • What safeguards can be in place to overcome the influence of individual interests to prioritize collective development and the extension of opportunities to all people?
  • How can Member States continue to provide assistance through financial means and technological advances to empower people and ensure inclusiveness and equality without replicating colonial conditions?
  • How do existing frameworks hinder the economic and social advancement of women and youth, and how can Member States improve them?

Bibliography Bibliography

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Science, technology and innovation for development Science, technology and innovation for development

Science, technology and innovation (STI) play a crucial role in United Nations development strategies and the socioeconomic transformation of countries. By taking advantage of modern technologies, developing economies can sidestep the development routes taken by the older, developed countries, while enabling them to increase national wealth and reduce their environmental impact. For this reason, STI for sustainable development is relevant to almost every country. However, the unique social environments of each country result in diverse challenges and opportunities for STI, from gender equity to managing unemployment caused by labor-saving technologies. Addressing these challenges becomes more important as the rate of technological advancement increases and widens the divide between countries with access to advanced STI and those without.

The United Nations first began discussing the role of STI for development in 1949 at the United Nations Scientific Conference for the Conservation and Utilization of Resources, where Member States discussed the potential for underdeveloped regions to benefit greatly from new technologies. It was not until 1961 that the Economic and Social Council would call for the creation of the United Nations Conference on the Application of Science and Technology for the Benefit of the Less Developed Areas, which took place in Geneva in 1963. Following the Geneva Conference, least developed countries (LDCs) began lobbying for increased access to science and technologies, signaling an optimism towards technology transfers and references to past work done by developed countries as possible solutions for underdevelopment. However, developed countries questioned whether the United Nations could appropriately safeguard their intellectual property. In response to growing discontent, the United Nations General Assembly convened the 1979 Conference on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) in Vienna, which focused on improving the spread of technology and the technological capacity of least developed countries. The Conference concluded that building technological progress in a country required coordinated effort at the national and international levels and in turn the United Nations General Assembly established the Intergovernmental Committee on Science and Technology for Development to assist in formulating policy guidelines and monitoring the activities and programmes related to science and technology. Despite this idea, the debt crisis of the 1980s in developing countries and the failure to adequately fund international agreements made in the wake of UNCSTD delayed progress.

The 1980s saw new efforts from the United Nations to employ STI in the implementation processes for social and economic development. This period ushered in the Third United Nations Development Decade which promoted the United Nations’ commitment to creating favorable conditions for development. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly called on governments and other stakeholders to increase technical and financial cooperation and assistance, particularly to LDCs, in order to meet set targets, including substantial improvements to drinking water and sanitation. A year later, the United Nations held the United Nation Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy which called for strengthened measures to accelerate transfer of technology on new and renewable sources of energy and dedicated research into alternative energy mechanisms. Unfortunately, the United Nations did not set up a fund to adequately support the energy transitions discussed at the conference and progress stalled as the high costs to the necessary technological adjustments became a barrier, particularly for LDCs. Seeking to strengthen the role and effectiveness of the United Nations through enhanced multilateral co-operation, the United Nations General Assembly reviewed the efficiency of its administration functions in the economic, social and related fields in 1989, which prompted the establishment of the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) in 1992. CSTD provides a forum for countries to raise critical challenges and explore opportunities presented by rapid technological development and has since expanded the mandate to include the examination of science and technology questions and their implications for development.

In 2000, the General Assembly adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, with ambitious goals for global development that necessarily relied on the successful application of science, the transformation of technology and the policy and structural conditions necessary for innovation. However, the international community continued to debate the appropriate policies to facilitate technology transfer. In 2013, the Committee for Development Policy called for considering STIs that aid provision of basic human needs as global public goods that are non-exclusive and available to all—a position favored by many developing States. This position would disrupt the traditional system of incentivizing researchers and inventors, which provides creators of new ideas with exclusive (and temporary) intellectual property rights (IPR) in the form of patents and copyrights. Two years later, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and established the Technology Facilitation Mechanism (TFM) which launched with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, to support the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals by facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration and partnerships through the sharing of information, experiences, best practices and policy advice. Since 2016, the TFM has convened the STI Forum, a multi-stakeholder discussion of STI cooperation around thematic areas involving scientific cooperation, innovation and capacity-building in order to identify and examine technology needs and gaps. Over the years, the STI Forum has focused on wide-ranging areas including eradicating poverty, ensuring inclusiveness and equality, and sustainable and resilient COVID-19 recovery. The STI Forums further demonstrate the commitment of the United Nations in using STI as tools for development and means for meeting the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals.


While the United Nations recognizes the vast possibilities of STI to improve human life through high levels of technological diffusion, a democratization of means to create and access new technologies, these scientific inquiries and technological advancements pose new and unique challenges and potential threats to security for all people. New biological advancements, designed to help scientists better understand disease, could be misused and transformed into weapons, while vulnerabilities in cyberspace can disrupt banking systems, hospitals, electrical grids and other parts of internet-connected critical infrastructure. Balancing these difficulties is further hindered by consistent underfunding and a lack of resources to support TFM activities.

Questions to consider from your country’s perspective:

  • How can the United Nations mobilize the UN Technology Facilitation Mechanism multi-stakeholder system to effectively meet the Sustainable Development Goals?
  • What safeguards can the United Nations employ to limit possible misuse of scientific, technological and innovative development?
  • How should intellectual property rights be balanced with increasing access to STI in developing countries?

 

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