Social Entrepreneurs Directly Contribute to Global Development Goals

In 1987, Gro Harlem Brundtland put forward the global objective of achieving sustainable development (UN General Assembly, 1987). She had been tasked by the United Nations General Assembly in 1983 to ‘make available a report on environment and the global problématique to the year 2000 and beyond, including proposed strategies for sustainable development’ (UN General Assembly, 1983). In her report, she explicitly assigned priority to satisfying the essential needs of the poor, such as those for ‘food, clothing, shelter, jobs’, and also to provide them with the ‘opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life’. This should be achieved, however, without ‘compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Brundtland, 1987). Brundtland thus identified the main goal for global efforts to trace a path of balanced social and economic development which was also compatible with a notion of social equity across the dimensions of space and time. Her report left open the question of how such balanced development could be achieved: No single blueprint of sustainability will be found, as economic and social systems and ecological conditions differ widely among countries. Each nation will have to work out its own concrete policy implications.