United Nations Economic and Social Council


The United Nations Economic and Social Council is one of six principal organs of the United Nations, responsible for coordinating the economic and social fields of the organization, specifically in regards to the fifteen specialized agencies, the eight functional commissions, and the five regional commissions under its jurisdiction.
ECOSOC serves as the central forum for discussing international economic and social issues, and formulating policy recommendations addressed to member states and the United Nations System. It has a rotating membership of 54 countries, and over 1,600 nongovernmental organizations have consultative status with the Council to participate in the work of the United Nations.
ECOSOC holds one four-week session each year in July, and since 1998 has also held an annual meeting in April with finance ministers of heading key committees of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Additionally, the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which reviews the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, is convened under the auspices of the Council every July.
The members of ECOSOC are responsible for electing the executive board of UNICEF, the council of the United Nations Development Programme, the committee of UNHCR, and various commissions and other bodies under its jurisdiction. ECOSOC is also responsible for tasks such as reviewing and updating the UN list of least developed countries.

President

The president of the Council is elected for a one-year term and chosen from the small or medium sized states represented on the Council at the beginning of each new session. The presidency rotates among the United Nations Regional Groups to ensure equal representation.
His Excellency Lok Bahadur Thapa was elected the President of the Economic and Social Council for the 2025-26 Session on 31 July 2025. His Excellency Bob Rae was elected the President of the Economic and Social Council for the 2024-25 Session on 25 July 2024. Paula Narváez, Representative of Chile, was elected as the seventy-ninth president of the Council on 27 July 2023. She succeeded Lachezara Stoeva, who was elected as the seventy-eighth president of the Council on 25 July 2022, succeeding Collen Vixen Kelapile of Botswana.

Members

The Council consists of 54 Member States, which are elected yearly by the General Assembly for overlapping three-year terms. Seats on the Council are allocated ensuring equitable geographic rotation among the United Nations regional groups. Outgoing members are eligible for immediate re-election, and some seats are held by de facto permanent members.

History

In 1945 when the United Nations Charter was originally signed, the Economic and Social Council consisted of 18 seats. The formal concept of the United Nations Regional Groups did not yet exist, and unlike the Security Council, there was no "gentlemen's agreement" between the superpowers to assign ECOSOC seats. Regardless, with 4 exceptions out of 102 elections, a relatively stable pattern emerged and held until 1960:
As the number of United Nations members grew with decolonization, the pattern began to break down starting in 1961, with nations in Africa winning elections to seats formerly held by Western Europe and the Republic of China.
In 1965, the Charter was amended to increase the size of ECOSOC to 27 seats, and the Regional Groups were formally introduced. The seat distribution became:
In 1973, the Charter was amended again to increase the size of ECOSOC to 54 seats. The seat distribution became:
  • 14 seats to the African Group
  • 11 seats to the Asia-Pacific Group
  • 6 seats to the Eastern European Group
  • 10 seats to the Latin American and Caribbean Group
  • 13 seats to the Western European and Others Group

    Current members

Observer Inter-Governmental Autonomous Organisations

Participation on a continuing basis:
Participation on an ad hoc basis:

Commissions

Functional commissions

Active

The following are the active functional commission of the Council:
The following commissions were disbanded by the Council and replaced by other bodies:
The following are the active regional commissions of the Council:
The key goal of the regional commissions is to "raise the level of economic activity"; none of the regional commissions has in its founding mandate a reference to sustainability or to the environmental dimension of development.
All UN regional commissions have expanded their activities to work toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. They increasingly include a concern for the environmental and social dimensions of development, along with their traditional economic focus. They have set standards for SDG implementation by providing support through reporting guidelines, performance indicators, and other managerial tools. However, their limited resources force them to prioritize; diverse sets of priorities in the region only partially overlap with the SDGs.
The regional commissions seek to link the global ambitions of the SDGs with regional actors, contexts, and priorities. In practice, however, when it comes to agenda setting, the regional commissions mostly seek to balance the new global agenda with their regional priorities and prior agendas.

Committees and other bodies

The following are some of the other bodies that the Council oversees in some capacity:

Standing committees

The specialized agencies of the United Nations are autonomous organizations working within the United Nations System, meaning that while they report their activities to the Economic and Social Council, they are mostly free to their own devices. Some were created before the United Nations existed and were integrated into the system, others were created by the League of Nations and were integrated by its successor, while others were created by the United Nations itself to meet emerging needs. Each agency must negotiate with the Council as to what their relationship will look and work like. This leads to a system where different organizations maintain different types of relationships with the Council. For example, the members of ECOSOC were responsible for granting a state admission to UNESCO, but now this is done by the members of UNESCO themselves.
The following is a list of the specialized agencies reporting to the Council:
In a report issued in early July 2011, the UN called for spending nearly US$2 trillion on green technologies to prevent what it termed "a major planetary catastrophe", warning that "It is rapidly expanding energy use, mainly driven by fossil fuels, that explains why humanity is on the verge of breaching planetary sustainability boundaries through global warming, biodiversity loss, and disturbance of the nitrogen-cycle balance and other measures of the sustainability of the earth's ecosystem".
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added: "Rather than viewing growth and sustainability as competing goals on a collision course, we must see them as complementary and mutually supportive imperatives". The report concluded that "Business as usual is not an option".