A/HRC/37/54 unavoidable and that they would frequently involve a major element of austerity. However, it noted that, under such circumstances, endeavours to protect the most basic economic, social and cultural rights became more, rather than less, urgent. 14 Since 1990 also, the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have been emphasizing the need for people-centred approaches to advance sustainable human development. 15. Nonetheless, the traditional macroeconomic policy recommendations of market liberalization and structural adjustment continued to dominate, while a number of initiatives were developed in parallel to mitigate their adverse social impacts. In the late 1980s, the international financial institutions launched “social funds” as temporary social assistance or social protection facilities. That initiative gave rise to the development of the early social impact assessment tools. However, those mechanisms were often not sufficient and the turnaround and resumption of inclusive growth often failed to materialize in the short and medium term. 16. The debt crisis deepened, especially in many low-income countries. A coalition of civil society organizations and some international agencies called for broad debt relief, arguing that many governments had been enticed into taking loans that did not deliver as promoted and the international economy did not evolve as anticipated. In 1996, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative became a reality, whereby governments would have to prepare Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, meet a number of economic management and performance targets, undertake economic and social reforms, and may receive extensive debt relief when they reached the completion point. Resources thus freed up could be directed towards poverty-reducing spending. 15 Following the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers became the instruments required by international financial institutions to support countries’ progress towards achieving Millennium Development Goal 1 on poverty reduction. 17. With the new millennium, the international development community turned more decisively to strengthening the agency of the actual beneficiaries beyond social service delivery systems. Attention shifted to social protection as a means of securing livelihoods for the elderly and people living with disabilities, facilitating access to nutrition, health and education for children, as well as generating household incomes during adjustment and transition periods. Social protection floors and conditional cash transfers became major trends in social development cooperation in the early 2000s, favoured by a wide range of governments. Conditional cash transfers have not been without some controversy given their explicit conditionality in contrast to simple cash transfers as social assistance. The distinction between the IMF’s support for means-tested cash transfers and strong targeting of social protection benefits to meet fiscal targets and the Social Protection Floors Initiative supported by the United Nations and the International Labour Organization, which emphasizes universal coverage and the human right to social security is apparent. 16 Yet, no consistent and comprehensive rights-based framework for conducting human rights impact assessments of economic reform programmes has emerged. III. Human rights impacts of austerity 18. Today, more than two thirds of countries across the world are contracting their public purses and limiting, rather than expanding, their fiscal space. 17 Countries are 14 15 16 17 6 See Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 2 (1990) on international technical assistance measures, para. 9. See International Monetary Fund (IMF) Survey: IMF Helping Countries on Health, Social Spending Policies (2008) available at https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sopol072508a. Thomas Stubbs and Alexander Kentikelenis, “Targeted social safeguards in the age of universal social protection: the IMF and health systems of low-income countries”, Critical Public Health (June 2017). See Isabel Ortiz and others, “Fiscal space for social protection and the SDGs: options to expand social investments in 187 countries”, Extension of Social Security Working Paper No. 48 (Geneva, ILO, 2017).