The Millennium Development Goals and Ambitious Developmental Engineering

Abstract

Donor governments have been accused of not doing enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs), while the mdgs have been accused from other quarters of not doing enough for development. The former position takes the mdgs as an unquestionable good, while the latter posits them as a Western ruse for the sedimentation of core–periphery relations. This paper transcends this debate, identifying in the goals a logic of ambitious social, cultural and spatial engineering. Inspired by Foucauldian development anthropology, the paper highlights three themes implicit in mdg texts, requiring biopolitical interventions on bodies, societies and spaces, namely risk, sex, gender and family; Homo Economicus; and the city. The paper concludes with a reflection on the likelihood of resistance to such interventions.

Notes

1 A Greig, D Hulme & M Turner, Challenging Global Inequality: Development Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p 131.

2 A Saith, ‘From universal values to Millennium Development Goals: lost in translation’, Development and Change, 37(6), 2006, p 1167.

3 C Gabay, ‘Consenting to “heaven”: the Millennium Development Goals and civil society in Malawi’, Globalizations, 8(4), 2011, pp 487–501.

4 For example, the World Bank (www.worldbank.org/mdgs); UK government (www.dfid.gov.uk/mdg); US government (www.usaid.gov/our_work/mdg); Oxfam (http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/health_and_education/mdgs.html); and ActionAid (www.actionaid.org.uk/899/millennium_development_goals.htmlCached - Similar).

5 See S Amin, ‘The Millennium Development Goals: a critique from the South’, Monthly Review, March 2006, at www.monthlyreview.org/0306amin.php, accessed 22 October 2009; and Saith, ‘From universal values to Millennium Development Goals’.

6 A Zai, ‘The Millennium Development Goals: back to the future?’, Third World Quarterly, 32(1), 2011, pp 27–43.

7 See Amin, ‘The Millennium Development Goals’; Gabay, ‘Consenting to “heaven”’, pp 491–492; and D Hulme ‘The making of the Millennium Development Goals: human development meets results-based management in an imperfect world’, Brooks World Poverty Institute Working Paper 16, Manchester: Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester, 2007. This paper adopts the position taken by, among others, D Williams, ‘Constructing the economic space: the World Bank and the making of Homo Oeconomicus’, Millennium, 28, 1999, pp 7999; G Harrison, ‘Economic faith, social project and a misreading of African society: the travails of neoliberalism in Africa’, Third World Quarterly, 26(8), 2005, pp 1303–1320; and D Williams & T Young, ‘Civil society and the liberal project in Ghana and Sierra Leone’, Journal of Intervention and State Building, forthcoming 2012. Harrison, ‘Economic faith, social project and a misreading of African society’, p 1307, proposes that the neoliberal developmentalist project assumes that ‘there is an immanent free market essence to all societies’, where self-reliant individuals will ‘pursue their own particular projects through freely associating with others’. Williams & Young, ‘Civil society and the liberal project’.

8 A full list of the goals can be found at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals, accessed 9 January 2012.

9 J Vandemoortele, ‘The mdg story: intention denied’, Development and Change, 42(1), 2011, p 4.

10 See Hulme, ‘The making of the Millennium Development Goals’; and B Sadasivam, ‘Wooing the mdg sceptics’, Development, 48(1), 2005, p 31.

11 See, for example, International Journal of Social Economics, 31(1–2), 2004; International Journal of Human Rights, 13(1), 2009; ids Bulletin, 41(1), 2010; and Third World Quarterly, 32(1), 2011.

12 See, for example, R Black & H White, Targeting Development: Critical Perspectives on the Millennium Development Goals, London: Routledge, 2004; C Fantu & C Bradford, The Millennium Development Goals: Raising the Resources to Tackle World Poverty, London: Zed Books, 2005; M McGillivray, Achieving the Millennium Development Goals, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; and S Fukuda-Parr, Millennium Development Goals: For a People-Centred Development Agenda, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012.

13 N Poku & J Whitman, ‘The Millennium Development Goals and development after 2015’, Third World Quarterly, 32(1), 2011, pp 191–193.

14 Hulme, ‘The making of the Millennium Development Goals’, pp 2–3.

15 Vandemoortele, ‘The mdg story’, p 8.

16 Saith, ‘From universal values to Millennium Development Goals’.

17 G Harrisson, Neoliberal Africa: Global Social Engineering, London: Zed Press, 2010.

18 Amin, ‘The Millennium Development Goals’.

19 P Antrobus, ‘mdgs: most distracting gimmicks?’, Convergence, 38(3), 2005, pp 49–52.

20 Saith, ‘From universal values to Millennium Development Goals’, p 1185.

21 J Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985, p xvi.

22 M Wetherell, S Taylor & S Yates, ‘Introduction’, in M Wetherell, S Taylor & S Yates, (eds), Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, London: Sage Publications, 2001, p 4.

23 These include those on the goals and associated indicators themselves, at www.un.org/millenniumgoals/, accessed 26 January 2012; the Millennium Declaration, at www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm, accessed 26 January 2012; the UN Millennium Project report for the Secretary General (also known as the Sachs Report), at http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/reports/fullreport.htm, accessed 26 January 2012; and the Secretary General's report to the 2010 mdg World Summit, Keeping the Promise, at www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/sgreport_draft.pdf, accessed 26 January 2012.

24 M Foucault, Power, ed J Faubion, New York: New Press, 2000, p 122.

25 SR Clegg, Frameworks of Power, London: Sage Publications, 1989, p 37.

26 M Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p 313.

27 R Ambrahamsen, ‘The power of partnerships in global governance’, Third World Quarterly, 25(8), 2004, p 1459.

28 J Bachmann, ‘Governmentality and counterterrorism—appropriating international security projects in Kenya’, Journal of Intervention and State Building, forthcoming 2012.

29 J Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp 19–21.

30 See International Political Sociology, 4(2), 2010; and exchanges between D Chandler, ‘Globalizing Foucault: from critique to apologia—reply to Kiersey and Rosenow’, Global Society, 24(2), 2010, pp 135–142 and N Kiersey, J Weidner & D Rosenow, ‘Response to Chandler’, Global Society, 24(2), 2010, pp 143–150.

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32 J Jospehs, ‘What can governmentality do for ir?’, International Political Sociology, 4(2), p 204.

33 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p 313.

34 Ban Ki Moon, Keeping the Promise, p 16.

35 Sachs Report, p108, emphasis added.

36 Each mdg is constituted by a sub-set of targets, each with their own subset of indicators. In this paper this will be represented as follows: Indicator x (mdg y, Target z).

37 United Nations Development Group (undg), Indicators for Measuring the Millennium Development Goals, New York: undg/UN Publications, 2003, pp 43–46.

38 unaids, Condom Social Marketing: Selected Case Studies, 2000, at http://data.unaids.org/publications/IRC-pub02/jc1195-condsocmark_en.pdf, accessed 11 November 2011; and unfpa State of World Population: Investing in Adolescents' Health and Rights, 2003, p 26, at http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2003/english/ch1/index.htm, http://data.unaids.org/publications/IRC-pub02/jc1195-condsocmark_en.pdf, accessed 11 November 2011; and unfpa State of World Population: Investing in Adolescents' Health and Rights, 2003, p 26, at http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2003/english/ch1/index.htm, accessed 11 November 2011.

39 P Griffin, ‘The World Bank, hiv/aids and sex in sub-Saharan Africa: a gendered analysis of neoliberal governance’, Globalizations, 8(2), p 236.

40 R Sabatier, Blaming Others: Prejudice, Race and Worldwide aids , London: Panos Institute, 1988, p 67.

41 Griffin, ‘The World Bank, hiv/aids and sex in sub-Saharan Africa’, p 236.

42 undg, Indicators for Measuring the Millennium Development Goals, p 46.

43 Griffin ‘The World Bank, hiv/aids and sex in sub-Saharan Africa’, p 239.

44 Sachs Report, p 78.

45 Ibid, pp 82–83.

46 Ibid, p 83.

47 See Greig et al, Challenging Global Inequality, pp 153–155, for an overview of these statements

48 Sachs Report, p 2.

49 Williams, ‘Constructing the economic space’, p 79.

50 A Ruckert, ‘The forgotten dimension of social reproduction: the World Bank and the poverty reduction strategy paradigm’, Review of International Political Economy, 17(5), 2010, p 824.

51 Sachs Report, p 28.

52 Sachs Report, p 84.

53 R Tabulawa, ‘International aid agencies, learner centred pedagogy, and political democratisation: a critique’, Comparative Education, 39(1), 2003, p 22.

54 J-F Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, London: Polity, 2009, p 108.

55 GJ Sefa Dei, ‘Learning culture, spirituality and local knowledge: implications for African schooling’, International Review of Education, 48(5), 2002, pp 341–342.

56 S Ilcan & L Phillips, ‘Developmentalities and calculative practices: the Millennium Development Goals’, Antipode, 42(4), 2010, pp 848–849.

57 N Brenner & N Theodore (eds), Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p vii.

58 undg, Indicators for Measuring the Millennium Development Goals, p 68.

59 Sachs Report, pp 72–73, emphasis added.

60 Ibid, p 76.

61 P Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p 145, emphasis added.

62 D Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

63 RB Potter & S Lloyd-Evans, The City in the Developing World, London: Prentice-Hall, 1998, p 119.

64 N Brenner & N Theodore, ‘Cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”’, in Brenner & Theodore (eds), Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p 21.

65 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, p 131.

66 For a more detailed discussion of the regulatory dynamics of pre- and postcolonial urban housing policy, see B Gruffyd-Jones, ‘Civilising African cities: international housing and urban policy from colonial to neoliberal times’, Journal of Intervention and State Building, forthcoming 2012.

67 Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine.

68 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

69 Ibid, p xvii.

70 See the UK Channel 4 documentary, ‘Slumming It’, 2010, at http://www.channel4.com/programmes/kevin-mccloud-slumming-it/4od, accessed 9 December 2011.