Professor Jimi Adesina delivered a keynote address at 48th Session of the United Nations Commission for Social Development (UNCSD) at the UN Headquarters in New York.?

The 48th Session, from Wednesday 3 to Friday 12 February 2010, marked the 15th anniversary of the 1995 World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen. The Session focused on “how best to advance [global] social development.”

Professor Adesina opened his 3 February keynote address with what he called “two contradictory realities: on the one hand, we have never been further from realising the commitments made in Copenhagen. On the other hand, we are at a historical moment for returning to a wider vision of social development.”

The poor record since 1995, he argued, reflected the narrowing of the vision of social development, and the consequences have been harsh:

“For many of our societies, the consequence of obsessive anti-statism was to fundamentally damage the nation-building project. The institutions and policy instruments for building social cohesion were severely undermined in the process of ‘reform’. Often, for the poorest countries there are no substitutes for the collective, public provisioning of these services. In the sub-Saharan African context people did not simply fall through the cracks; they died.”

Drawing on the research work done at the UN Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva, where he was a research coordinator, and the current work at Rhodes University under the Transformative Social Policy Programme, Prof Adesina argued that the starting point for a new social development agenda is a return to the wider vision; one that is based “on visionary agenda setting... [and] the norms of equality and social solidarity.” Recognising the multiple functions of Social Policy (production, protection, reproduction, redistribution, and social cohesion) is central to this wider vision.

Prof Adesina described the invitation to deliver the keynote address as a privilege: “I was surprised when I received the invitation from the UN; they could have chosen from thousands of more deserving colleagues from around the world.” he said. “The feedbacks have been most gratifying and an encouragement to the work we are doing here at Rhodes University.”

The delegates to the 48th Session are mainly top government officials—mostly ministers responsible for social development—major NGOs, and academics.

Adesina is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Transformative Social Policy Programme at Rhodes University.

For further details on the 48th Session of the United Nations Commission for Social Development, you can visit http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/csd/2010.html