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Foresight for smart globalization: accelerating and enhancing pro-poor development opportunities
Edited by Clement Bezold, Claudia Juech and Evan Michelson
Introduction: past and present of the Rockefeller Foundation
John D. Rockefeller, Sr, envisioned and established the Rockefeller Foundation during the early years of the twentieth century, an era of momentous transition and consequence around the world. The forces of industrialization unleashed unanticipated challenges and opportunities, and the Foundation helped, in Rockefeller's words, to "promote the well-being" of humanity amidst the currents of historic change.
These early moments of the twenty-first century are equally transformational because of globalization. As with industrialization at the time of our founding, globalization's effects can be both beneficial and burdensome.
The work of the Rockefeller Foundation for the twenty-first century is to enable "smart globalization". It attempts to harness the creative forces of globalization to ensure that the tools and technologies that have significantly improved the human condition in many parts of the world during the past half century are accessible today to more people, more fully, in more places.
"Smart Globalization"
Around the world, people reap the positive benefits of revolutionary advances in health and medicine and profound progress in physical and social sciences. We share markets and capital, knowledge and ideas, and dramatically more diverse communities. In the last three decades, illiteracy worldwide has dropped by half. Eighty percent of the world's population lives in countries where poverty is declining. A decade into the new century, we have much to be optimistic about (see Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).
Not everyone's lives, though, are improving fast enough, nor are they improving equitably. Half of the people on earth subsist on less than two dollars a day. A billion people live in abject poverty, with neither running water nor enough to eat. Ten million children succumb to preventable or treatable diseases every year. Climate change and environmental degradation pose the greatest dangers to the communities least prepared to weather them.
Both the benefits and burdens - the opportunities and risks - of worldwide progress are propelled by globalization, the economic and social process by which economies and communities grow inextricably interdependent.
Under that broad headline - and building on our history, legacy, and insight into the evolving world in...