The UN and Development provides the first comprehensive overview of the development policies and activities of the United Nations system from the late 1940s to the present. With an explicit focus on the history of the ideas that have been generated, institutionalized, and implemented by UN organizations, this book examines changing trends in development paradigms from the concept of technical assistance to underdeveloped countries, as they were called in the late 1940s, to development cooperation in the 21st century. Olav Stokke traces this fascinating story and demonstrates the UN's essential role and its future challenges in aiding the least developed countries and the globe's billion poorest inhabitants.

The United Nations Development Programme is the central network co-ordinating the work of the United Nations in over 160 developing countries. This 2006 book provides the first authoritative and accessible history of the Programme and its predecessors. Based on the findings of hundreds of interviews and archives in more than two dozen countries, Craig Murphy traces the history of the UNDP's organizational structure and mission, its relationship to the multilateral financial institutions, and the development of its doctrines. He argues that the principles on which the UNDP was founded remain as relevant in a world divided by terrorism as they were in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as are the fundamental problems that have plagued the Programme from its origin, including the opposition of traditionally isolationist forces in the industrialized world.

This book is the product of the 2nd World Conference on Environmental History, held in Guimarães, Portugal, in 2014. It gathers works by authors from the five continents, addressing concerns raised by past events so as to provide information to help manage the present and the future. It reveals how our cultural background and examples of past territorial intervention can help to combat political and cultural limitations through the common language of environmental benefits without disguising harmful past human interventions. Considering that political ideologies such as socialism and capitalism, as well as religion, fail to offer global paradigms for common ground, an environmentally positive discourse instead of an ecological determinism might serve as an umbrella common language to overcome blocking factors, real or invented, and avoid repeating ecological loss. Therefore, agency, environmental speech and historical research are urgently needed in order to sustain environmental paradigms and overcome political, cultural an economic interests in the public arena. This book intertwines reflections on our bonds with landscapes, processes of natural and scientific transfer across the globe, the changing of ecosystems, the way in which scientific knowledge has historically both accelerated destruction and allowed a better distribution of vital resources or as it, in today’s world, can offer alternatives that avoid harming those same vital natural resources: water, soil and air. In addition, it shows the relevance of cultural factors both in the taming of nature in favor of human comfort and in the role of the environment matters in the forging of cultural identities, which cannot be detached from technical intervention in the world. In short, the book firstly studies the past, approaching it as a data set of how the environment has shaped culture, secondly seeks to understand the present, and thirdly assesses future perspectives: what to keep, what to change, and what to dream anew, considering that conventional solutions have not sufficed to protect life on our planet.

The purpose of the paper is to identify and describe significant sources of foreign assistance and their interrelations, with emphasis on the US programs of assistance to less-developed nations. It is designed to provide a partial basis for further studies on coordination and effectiveness of these programs including problems associated with coordination of US economic and military assistance programs (MAPs). The paper covers programs and agencies extending capital grants and loans, investment guarantees, technical assistance, and other forms of economic assistance primarily to less-developed countries. Public sources such as governments, UN agencies, and US voluntary agencies are described. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is also covered because of its role in stabilizing currencies that otherwise would endanger national development programs although it is not a source of economic aid in direct support of development programs. Military assistance is included only to the extent of the US program because of problems in coordinating US economic and military assistance. (Author).