rozvojová pomoc a spolupráca - Fakulta medzinárodných vzťahov

9 Social and Environmental Aspects ofDevelopment Aid and CooperationWe live in a world characterized by inequality and diversity. David S.Landes, professor emeritus of economic history at Harvard University hasapproached this image from the following perspective. Accordingly, wedistinguish between three kinds of nations. In the first kind people spend lots ofmoney in order to keep their weight down. People of the second kind eat tolive. And the last one is the kind of a nation whose people don’t know wherethe next meal is coming from.Some amount of concern has been given to the issues of poverty,malnutrition, lack of disease prevention and environmental poverty indeveloping states recently. However, modern economics has not been able toprovide us with any satisfactory solutions to the problems just mentioned.Some of the scientific research has been done by many well-respectedeconomists and research institutes or even by truly global organizations, as forinstance by the United Nations Development Program. But on the other hand,most of their conclusions have not been fully regarded by the world of businessand politics yet. In response to it, the economic science has to undergo aprocess of linking the problems to their roots and afterwards to possiblesolutions. The last step that is still profoundly lagging behind is linking thesolutions to the policy implications - the final action for making parts of theworld less poor, less hungry and less stressed by negative occurrences.Development aid and cooperation are the policy instruments of immenseimportance. Nevertheless, their potential has not been fully harnessed yet.Moreover, their use has been connected to lot of mismanagement. In order touse these instruments correctly, we are to be more familiar with the social butalso environmental aspects of human development. Issues concerningenvironment are today penetrating into the policies of European Union anddevelopment aid policy is not exempting. Human development stands for thebasic prerequisite to overcome the barriers to policy action and finally theproblems of poverty, malnutrition, and the like.124