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Socio-emotional well-being, established through nurturing relationships and community experiences, enables children and adults to evolve into caring, nonviolent, emotionally healthy citizens. This paper analyses purposefully selected development texts, authored by three prominent contributors of socio-economic development discourse: the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. On the basis of a socio-emotional capacity development framework that draws from research produced in the areas of developmental psychology, biopsychology, brain research and peace psychology, the study evaluates texts’ tendencies to make socio-emotionally conducive – or neglectful – programme recommendations. The study finds that United Nations conference reports indirectly acknowledge the relevance for socio-emotional enablement and protection, in the context of discussions related to human and children's rights, education or women's empowerment. However, they only marginally discuss the need to foster socio-emotional well-being as a human capacity development rationale per se. The International Monetary Fund, while acknowledging responsibility for the social conduciveness of macro-economic development interventions, does not address socio-emotional capacity development issues. The World Bank's strategic plan and other strategy papers touch on issues of socio-emotional capacity development only tangentially. The study concludes that the discourse communities authoring the selected development texts largely ignore the question of socio-emotional capacity development. Their discourses ‘background’ discussions about the kind and nature of social structures necessary for nurturing socio-emotional enablement. Developmental psychologists are challenged to ‘infect’ socio-economic development discourse by calling for the effective integration of the theme of socio-emotional well-being into socio-economic development publications. Published by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons.

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