Topics include agricultural development, basic needs, development strategy and planning, economic development and policy, employment, food production, housing needs, income distribution and industrialization. Indexes are divided by references, authors, corporate authors, subject and geographical aspects.

Traces the history of ideas central to UN debates from its establishment in 1945 to the late 1990s. Analyses the four founding ideas of the UN (peace and negotiation in place of war, decolonization, human rights and economic and social development) and highlights the different phases of the UN's intellectual history: the focus on development in the 1960s, the challenge of employment and basic needs in the 1970s, UN global conferences in the 1970s and 1990s, the financial and social crises of the globalization era, the collapse of the Socialist bloc, widening income gaps and crises of national and global governance.