made the reduction of poverty and social exclusion an explicit and
operational objective, to be achieved through National Action Plans
and the open method of coordination.^53 A year later, the Council
commissioned a report on a “new architecture for social protection”
in Europe.^54 Initiated by a renewed social-democratic left but also
accepted by a right that had moved toward the center, a new con-
sensus seemed to be emerging on the need to combine economic
objectives with institutions and policies that protected social cohesion
and fostered social justice.
The new development consensus
In world politics, at the turn of the century, North–South negotiations
also gave way to a remarkable rapprochement between the left and
the right, to the point that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan could
speak in 2005 of an “unprecedented consensus” on how to manage
relations between rich and poor countries.^55 Using the term “con-
sensus” to describe development diplomacy was perhaps too opti-
mistic, but the concept nonetheless resonated among experts, who
referred in turn to a post-Washington consensus, a Copenhagen con-
sensus, a Monterrey consensus, or a Sao Paulo consensus, to capture
the changing dynamics of North–South relations.
The multilateral system provides the best vantage point from which
to examine how global development was debated by conservatives
and progressives. For over half a century, the market-oriented approach
of the Bretton Woods institutions had indeed stood in sharp contrast
to the social-democratic approach of the United Nations and its
agencies.^56 At the end of the 1990s, the ideological gulf between these
(^53) Noe ̈l, “The New Global Politics of Poverty,” p. 305.
(^54) Gøsta Esping-Andersen, with Duncan Gallie, Anton Hemerijck, and John Myles,
55 Why We Need a New Welfare State, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. xxv.
Kofi A. Annan,In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and
Human Rights for All, Report of the Secretary-General, New York, United
56 Nations, 2005, p. 7 (www.un.org/largerfreedom).
Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, and Thomas G. Weiss,The Power of UN Ideas:
Lessons from the First 60 Years, New York, United Nations Intellectual
History Project, 2005; Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, Dharam Ghai, and
Fre ́de ́ric Lapeyre,UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice;
Bob Deacon (with Michelle Hulse and Paul Stubbs),Global Social Policy:
International Organizations and the Future of Welfare, London, Sage, 1997,
Twenty-first-century rapprochement 181