The forgotten summit
You probably didn't hear, but the World Social Summit was held this week.
This week saw the World Social Summit (WSSD) in Doha, Qatar, the first time the UN has held a summit on social services, like education, health or social protection, since Copenhagen in 1995.
Ahead of the Summit, a statement by the Public Services coalition was endorsed by 111 organisations, calling for social development to be prioritised over the coming month, including at the WSSD, COP, the G20 and the start of the negotiations for the UN Tax Convention. At the same time, GCAP adopted the Peoples’ Declaration for Social Justice, calling for a new global social contract.
Despite the lack of global attention, it was heartening to see thousands of people come to Doha for the World Summit for Social Development and the depth of some of the conversations that happened.
A mountain to climb. The summit was always going to struggle to be noticed, with the world distracted on so many fronts. But, arguably, it was more evaded than eclipsed. The worst cuts to aid in history, including massive cuts to health, mean that donor countries have lots to hide and little to celebrate. In fact, they should be hanging their heads in shame.
Engines of equality. This is a terrible shame, because health, education, social protection and indeed other social services can be powerful engines of equality - for governments keen to close the gap between the rich and the rest there is not many other thing that can be done that are more successful, or indeed more popular with the public; at a time when addressing the anger of Gen Z is becoming more and more important for survival.
Publicly good. Public services are underfunded. Almost half of humanity lives in countries that spend more on servicing interest on debt than on health or education. In 2024, Oxfam highlighted that 84 percent of countries have cut investment in education, health and social protection. Nine out of ten countries have backtracked in one or more areas.
The services that work are public, universal, and free at the point of use. The evidence is overwhelming, and the stories of success are truly heartening. Take Thailand. They introduced universal health coverage in 2002 for their population of 65 million people, with a per capita income similar to that of the US in 1930. Over 80% of all care is delivered by the state. Funded by progressive taxation, quality health services are available free to everyone and benefit the poorest people most.
Privately bad. Yet the advice of the World Bank and others for decades has been the opposite: to promote the private provision of services, and to get people to pay for them, either up front with fees, or through insurance schemes. There is a clear risk that this trend would only grow as aid shrinks. Indeed, the Social Summit itself alarmingly called for a greater focus on Public-Private Partnerships for healthcare as a solution. As Oxfam and Bloomberg have documented, this has directly fuelled human rights abuses, whether in education or health. Patients are routinely turned into prisoners, held in hospitals until bills can be paid, or the bodies of loved ones are kept in the morgue until money is found to pay. And beyond the headline horror stories, the simple fact of hundreds of millions unable to get education or medicines because they cannot pay. Meanwhile, in the last year, a total of 50 new health and pharmaceutical billionaires were minted, as private health and medicine continue to deliver dividends for those at the top. Such inequality has been shown to drive pandemics in a new report released this week.
Just plain mean. Social protection schemes have also suffered from decades of wrong advice, insisting that governments spend time and money trying to means-test benefits, only giving them to poor people. Maybe it makes sense on paper, but it is virtually impossible in practice and cruelly excludes so many who need help. At the same time, services targeted only at the poor are invariably poor services, as the middle classes go private and see no value in paying taxes to pay for public services they don’t use. This also ignores the history of virtually all Global North countries, where the most successful benefits are those that are universal, grants for all children, or for all mothers, or for all pensioners- their universality making them hugely popular with the whole of society; not just in their own right, but in a broader sense of creating a social contract and holding the state and society together- pretty important aims right now in almost every country.
The summit outcome. Three days and over 200 (!) physical events later, the Summit concluded. The Doha Political Declaration was adopted, which renewed leaders’ commitment to the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration and the SDG agenda, centring social development on the three pillars of poverty eradication, full and productive employment and decent work for all, and social inclusion.
The consensus. That inequality is a critical issue. There is an emerging political agreement that it is time for a more meaningful commitment to action on universal social protection. There is a surprising degree of agreement among UN agencies, political leaders and civil society about the urgency of having a more coordinated strategy on public services.
The tension. The continued tendency to look to the private sector for solutions. There is also a tension between development as usual and responding to the tectonic shifts taking place in the development landscape at the global level.
The Social Summit was the start of a journey, not the end of it. As the global spotlight moves to the COP, states and international actors gathered there must focus on inequality reduction and recognise that comprehensive support for public services is central to the ‘justice’ involved in a ‘just transition’ and must ensure that climate finance also supports the expansion and resilience of publicly delivered essential services.
In other news…
Committee storms the Cape. Meanwhile, Professor Joseph Stiglitz and his Extraordinary Committee have presented their Inequality report to President Cyril Ramaphosa in Cape Town, in a move covered widely around the world. Whilst not wearing capes, the findings of Stiglitz and his brave committee members are indeed extraordinary. Whilst global wealth has more than doubled since 2000, for every dollar of new wealth created, the super-rich got 41 cents, whilst the bottom half of humanity got 1 cent. And core to their recommendations for fighting inequality- public services for all and universal social protection.
An Inequality IPCC?
The committee rightly highlights that the world faces an inequality emergency, on a par with the climate emergency, and that indeed the two emergencies are closely linked. To tackle the Inequality Emergency, they call for the establishment of a new International Panel on Inequality, something President Ramaphosa supported strongly and has committed to championing with his fellow G20 governments- the next few weeks will see whether this recommendation becomes a reality.
Something to read and watch
Read Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s boss in Al Jazeera- Gen Z are demanding schools and hospitals, not super yachts and helicopters.
Watch Zohran Mamdani’s barnstorming acceptance speech winning the Mayoralty of New York City. ‘Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns-these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.’
Read Oxfam in Asia’s latest inequality report, “An Unequal Future. Asia’s Struggle for Justice in a Warming, Wired World”