The report observes that in response to obvious failures in the current development model, the international community has begun to move in various directions. There is little coherent orientation to this process. A renewed emphasis on poverty alleviation is perhaps the most visible new departure, says the report. Their focus is narrowly remedial and is all too easily associated with an attack on the principle that public services should be extended to all citizens equally. Creating a dual structure of social services-one aimed at the poor and funded by the state, and one aimed at everyone else and provided by the private sector, is good neither for social integration nor for the quality of public services.
Public provision is under attack from other quarters as well, the report adds.
Both the aborted Multilateral Agreement on Investment and discussions in the WTO would convert basic public services into commodities - subject to the same competitive bidding as any other item in the general category of 'trade in services'. To offset the divisive incursion of market forces into areas that are essential for social security and stability, there has been renewed support during the past five years for some form of global social standard-setting, the report observes. When linked to trade sanctions, this has proved extremely controversial. Since increasing globalization requires the elaboration of shared social norms, it is necessary to find a way out of this impasse. As the social and political nature of the market becomes obvious to a wider group of thinkers and policy makers, there is an incipient return to the kinds of integrated approaches to development that were in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, says the report.