The United Nations (UN) is a diplomatic and political international organization with the intended purpose of maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, achieving international cooperation, and serving as a center for coordinating the actions of member nations. It is widely recognised as the world's largest international organization. The UN is headquartered in New York City, in international territory with certain privileges extraterritorial to the United States, and the UN has other offices in Geneva, Nairobi, Vienna, and The Hague, where the International Court of Justice is headquartered at the Peace Palace.
International development or global development is a broad concept denoting the idea that societies and countries have differing levels of economic or human development on an international scale. It is the basis for international classifications such as developed country, developing country and least developed country, and for a field of practice and research that in various ways engages with international development processes. There are, however, many schools of thought and conventions regarding which are the exact features constituting the "development" of a country.
Mahbub ul-Haq was a Pakistani economist, international development theorist, and politician who served as the minister of Finance from 10 April 1985 to 28 January 1986, and again from June to December 1988 as a caretaker. Regarded as one of the greatest economists of his time, Haq devised the Human Development Index, widely used to gauge the development of nations.
Hilde Frafjord Johnson is a Norwegian politician from the Christian Democratic Party. She is a former Minister of International Development of Norway, and member of the Norwegian Government. She most recently served as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan, completing her term in July 2014
Trafficking of children is a form of human trafficking and is defined by the United Nations as the "recruitment, transportation, harboring, and/or receipt" kidnapping of a child for the purpose of slavery, forced labour, and exploitation. This definition is substantially wider than the same document's definition of "trafficking in persons". Children may also be trafficked for adoption. Not all adoption is a form of human trafficking, but illegal adoption is. Illegal adoptions violate multiple child rights norms and principles, including the best interests of the child, the principle of subsidiarity and the prohibition of improper financial gain.
The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is a non-profit non-governmental organization working "to bring together women of different political views and philosophical and religious backgrounds determined to study and make known the causes of war and work for a permanent peace" and to unite women worldwide who oppose oppression and exploitation. WILPF has national sections in 37 countries.
Sir Fazle Hasan Abed was the founder of BRAC, one of the world's largest non-governmental organizations.
Frances Julia Stewart is professor emeritus of development economics and director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE), University of Oxford. A pre-eminent development economist, she was named one of fifty outstanding technological leaders for 2003 by Scientific American. She was president of the Human Development and Capability Association from 2008 to 2010.
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr is a development economist, a Professor of International Affairs at the New School for Social Research in New York, and the Vice Chair of the UN Committee for Development Policy. She has gained recognition for her work with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), her writing on human rights and development, and for founding the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. She was the principal author of the UN Human Development Reports (1995-2004).
Philip Geoffrey Alston is an Australian international law scholar and human rights practitioner. He is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and co-chair of the law school's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. In human rights law, Alston has held a range of senior UN appointments for over two decades, including United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, a position he held from August 2004 to July 2010, and UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights from 2014-2020.
The concept of human development expands upon the notion of economic development to include social, political and even ethical dimensions. Since the mid-twentieth century, international organisations such as the United Nations and the World Bank have adopted human development as a holistic approach to evaluating a country’s progress that considers living conditions, social relations, individual freedoms and political institutions that contribute to freedom and well-being, in addition to standard measures of income growth.
Michael Ward was a British economist and statistician who contributed significantly to the evolution of the international statistical system in the post-war period.
Kevin Charles Watkins is at the London School of Economics as a visiting professor of development practice at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. Recently the chief executive of Save the Children UK, from October 2016 until his resignation in July 2021. He was previously at the Overseas Development Institute as executive director in June 2013. His research focuses on education, globalization and human development. He is a former nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. He was previously the director and lead author of the UNESCO's Education for All Global Monitoring Report.
Giovanni Andrea Cornia was an Italian development economist. He was professor of economics, department of economics and management, at the University of Florence. He had previously been the director of the Regional Institute of Economic Planning of Tuscany, the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), in Helsinki, and the Economic and Policy Research Program, UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, in Florence. He was formerly also chief economist, UNICEF, New York. His main areas of professional interest were income and asset inequality, poverty, growth, child well-being, human development and mortality crises, transition economics, and institutional economics. He was author of over a dozen books and dozens of articles, reports and working papers on practical development economics issues in individual countries, regions and globally. Born on 9 April 1947, he died in July 2024, at the age of 77.
Üner Kirdar is a noted author on international development issues, retired Turkish diplomat and senior United Nations official. He is one of the early pioneers of Human development theory and, since the mid-1980s, has advocated and worked for the concept’s worldwide adoption.
Thomas G. Weiss is a distinguished international diplomat and scholar of international relations and global governance with special expertise in the politics of the United Nations, where he himself served in various high-ranking roles. He was named a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow for a project exploring the concept of a world without the United Nations. Since 1998, he has been Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and is Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. At present, he also is co-chair, Cultural Heritage at Risk Project, J. Paul Getty Trust; Distinguished Fellow, Global Governance, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs; Global Eminence Scholar, Kyung Hee University, Seoul. In his spare time, he is a wood sculptor.
The Journal of Human Development and Capabilities is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of people-centered human development and capabilities. It is published by Routledge on behalf of the Human Development and Capability Association. It was established in 2000 as the Journal of Human Development, obtaining its current title in 2009. Its founding editors-in-chief were Khadija Haq, Richard Jolly, and Sakiko Fukuda-Parr.
Rolph Eric van der Hoeven is emeritus professor on employment and development economics at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and was appointed in 2009 as a member of the Committee on Development Cooperation of the International Advisory Council (AIV) to the Dutch Government. Dr. van der Hoeven is a member of the Board of Trustees of the KNCV Tuberculosis Fund.
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purposes of economic development. The World Bank is the collective name for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Association (IDA), two of five international organizations owned by the World Bank Group. It was established along with the International Monetary Fund at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. After a slow start, its first loan was to France in 1947. In its early years, it primarily focused on rebuilding Europe. Over time, it focused on providing loans to developing world countries. In the 1970s, the World Bank re-conceptualized its mission of facilitating development as being oriented around poverty reduction. For the last 30 years, it has included NGOs and environmental groups in its loan portfolio. Its loan strategy is influenced by environmental and social safeguards.
Santosh Mehrotra is a development economist, whose research and writings have had most influence in the areas of labour, employment, skill development, on the relationship between human development and economic growth, child poverty, and the economics of education. He was an economic adviser in the United Nations system in New York City, Italy, and Thailand (1991–2006), and technocrat in the government of India (2006–2014), apart from making contributions to academic research since the mid-1980s. He has also in recent years established a reputation as an institution-builder in the field of research in India, despite facing difficult odds. He brings a combination of professional experience: with the Indian government as a policy maker and adviser, with international organisations as a technical expert, having lived on three continents and travelled to 63 countries providing technical advice to governments; and as an academic whose research work has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German.
