UNRISD

United Nations Research Institute For Social Development

United Nations Research Institute for Social Development
UNRISD is located at the United Nations Office at Geneva
Abbreviation	UNRISD
Formation	1963
Type	UN entity
Legal status	Active
Headquarters	Geneva, Switzerland
Head	Paul Ladd
Website	www.unrisd.org

The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) is "an autonomous research institute within the United Nations that undertakes multidisciplinary research and policy analysis on the social dimensions of contemporary development issues”. UNRISD was established in 1963 with the mandate of conducting policy-relevant research on social development that is pertinent to the work of the United Nations Secretariat, regional commissions and specialized agencies, and national institutions.

A small team of researchers coordinates UNRISD’s research programmes, which focus primarily on the developing world, working in collaboration with national research teams from local universities and research institutes. The Institute’s work takes a holistic, multidisciplinary and political economy approach. UNRISD’s location at the United Nations Office at Geneva gives researchers access to channels of policy influence through active participation in events, meetings, conferences and working groups.

UNRISD was established in 1963 “to conduct research into problems and policies of social development, and relationships between various types of social development and economic development”. It was originally set up with a grant from the Government of the Netherlands, and its first Board Chair was the eminent economist Jan Tinbergen, who received the first-ever Nobel prize for economics in 1969.

UNRISD’s initial research focused on the design of indicators to measure development not just in terms of economic growth but also social factors, such as nutrition, health and education. As such, it employed many statisticians in its early years. Another early project focused on cooperatives as a tool for development, which produced some controversial results.

In the 1970s, global population growth made food production, supply and eventually food systems into a key topic in development. UNRISD’s work on the so-called Green Revolution (the introduction of newly bred high-yield grain seeds to increase food production) took a typically critical view. It highlighted the fact that the quantity of food available was only one factor in ensuring populations in developing countries were not subject to hunger. Power inequalities impacting on the distribution of foodstuffs played a key role in determining who got enough to eat and who didn’t.

By the 1980s, UNRISD was growing in size, in terms of both funding and staffing. Its remit diversified to cover popular participation and refugee issues, gradually leaving some of its early preoccupation with statistics behind.