Social Development Reconsidered: A Eulogy for the United Nations World Summit for Social Development

Since the end of the East‐West military‐ideological bipolarity in 1990, the world's attention has been increasingly focused upon the North‐South ecologic‐economic dichotomy. The Rio Global Summit in 1992 brought out this point with the confrontation of the world's contradictory priorities: environment versus development, whose dialectical synthesis or diplomatic compromise is captured in the slogan of “sustainable development”.