A new framework for development cooperation.

• Author: Haq, Mahbub ul
• Position: United Nations Development Programme - Excerpt from address to European Parliamentarian Conference, Bonn, Germany, September 17, 1994

A new concept of global human security is beginning to emerge - hesitantly but surely - from the receding shadows of the cold war.

Human security:

* is not just security of land, it is security of people;

* is not just security through arms, it is security through development;

* is not just security of nations, it is security of individuals in their homes and in their jobs;

* is not just a defence against conflicts between nations, it is a defence against conflicts between people.

Human security is a child that did not die, a disease that did not spread, an ethnic violence that did not explode, a woman who was not raped, a poor person that did not starve, a dissident who was not silenced, a human spirit that was not crushed.

Let us also recognize four new dimensions of this emerging concept of human security:

* First, people security is relevant to people everywhere, whether in rich nations or in poor.

* Second, when security of people is attacked in any corner of the world, all nations are likely to get involved. Famines, ethnic conflicts, social integration, terrorism, pollution, drug trafficking are no longer isolated events, confined within national borders. Global communications now force them on our collective conscience. And their consequences travel all over the globe.

* Third, it is less costly to meet these threats upstream than downstream. A $2-billion spent on soldiers in Somalia today buys us much less human security than the same investment would have 10 years ago in socio-economic development.

* Fourth, new threats to human security require sustainable human development, not acquisition of more powerful weapons.

It is within this new framework of human security that we must also design a new pattern of development cooperation, based on:

* mutual contracts between nations, not one-way transfers;

* investment in the common objectives of global survival and global prosperity; and

* a new respect for human security all over the world.

Let me offer you a concrete six-point new design of development cooperation. First, we need a new motivation for development cooperation, based on fighting the growing threat of global poverty rather than the receding threat of the cold war.

Let us also put aside around 2 per cent of existing official development assistance (ODA) budgets (or about $1 billion a year) for cultivating the new constituencies of change - half of it to be spent bilaterally, and half through international channels.

Second...