![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Even if the MDGs are achieved, the world will still face unacceptably high levels of hunger, morbidity, mortality and illiteracy beyond 2015. Global targets can be drivers of change. The debate about the post-2015 framework should not be about the usefulness of global targets but about their improved architecture and enhanced relevance. After reviewing the good, the bad and the ugly that have happened since the MDGs were created, this article discusses several challenges and pitfalls in the process of defining the post-2015 framework, including the need to formulate the MDGs more clearly as global targets, to maintain their measurability, to focus on ends, to embed equality of opportunity, to include interim targets, and to conduct global summitry differently so as to make it better fit for purpose. A Peer & Partner Group is proposed as the global custodian of the MDGs in order to reduce undue donorship.
Notes
1 The MDGs capture social and economic rights, not civil and political rights. When Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was asked, ‘What, in your view, is the worst human rights problem in the world today?’, she replied, ‘Absolute poverty’. See ‘Making “global” and “ethical” rhyme: an interview with Mary Robinson, 9 December 2003, at http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-open_politics/article_1627.jsp.
2 It should be noted that the high-level session of the UN General Assembly that took place in New York in 2010 carried the title ‘On the Millennium Development Goals’ and not ‘On the Millennium Declaration’.
3 M Langford, ‘A poverty of rights: six ways to fix the MDGs’, IDS Bulletin, 41(1), 2010, pp 83–91.
4 UN Development Group (UNDG), Making the MDGs Matter: A Country Perspective, report of a UNDG Survey, New York: UNDG, 2005.
5 UN Development Programme (UNDP), Beyond the Midpoint: Achieving the Millennium Development Goals, New York: UNDP, 2010, p 8.
6 WHO, Report of the World Health Organization Expert Working Group on Research and Development Financing, Geneva: WHO, 2010, p 1.
7 Data are taken from UN, The Millennium Development Goals Report 2010, New York: UN, 2010. The most recent year for which data are available is 2008. Data are available at http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Data/2010%20Stat%20Annex.pdf. The one-sentence summary of the huge database is that the world needs to cover the remaining 60 per cent of the road in less than 30 per cent of the time.
8 The 2005 report of the Blair Commission for Africa opens with a sentence that contradicts the facts: ‘African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time'. Commission for Africa, Our Common Interest, London: Penguin, 2005, p 12. Similarly, the first European Report on Development, issued in 2009, was entitled Overcoming Fragility in Africa, at http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/infopoint/publications/development/44b_overcomingfragility2009_en.htm.
9 For example, the chief economist for Africa at the World Bank states, ‘The MDGs are about Africa’, thereby implying that they have little or no relevance to countries outside his region or to middle-income countries. S Devarajan, Africa Can … End Poverty, blog submitted on 30 March 2010, at http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/africa-and-the-millennium-development-goals.
10 UNICEF Plan of Action for Implementing the World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children in the 1990s, New York: UNICEF, 1990, paragraph 6.
11 This common perspective is reflected in J Waage et al, ‘The Millennium Development Goals: a cross-sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting after 2015’, Lancet and the London International Development Centre Commission, published online on 13 September 2010, at http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61196-8/fulltext.
12 R Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, London: Princeton University Press, 2010.
13 Galbraith derided trickle-down by referring to the horse and sparrow theory. He wrote, ‘If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows’. JK Galbraith, ‘Recession economics’, New York Review of Books, 29(1), 1982.
14 Duffield exposes the discrepancy between how rich countries handle development at home and how they perceive it in poor nations. At home, ‘life is supported and compensated through a range of social and private insurance-based benefits and bureaucracies covering birth, sickness, education, unemployment and pensions’. In the South, ‘life is expected to be self-reliant’. Unlike the extension of social security in rich countries, the conventional view among donors is that people in the South have to be helped to help themselves. They seldom call for a publicly sponsored social security system, as is the case in the North. M. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, p ix.
15 He adds, ‘Despite this, we are constantly told how neo-liberal globalization has brought unprecedented benefits’. H-J Chang, Bad Samaritans—Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World, London: Random House, 2007, p 28.
16 Press conference by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon at United Nations Headquarters, 13 September 2010, at http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2010/sgsm13095.doc.htm.
17 R Jolly, Global Goals—The UN Experience, occasional paper, New York: Human Development Report Office, UNDP, 2003, p 20.
18 R Manning, ‘Using indicators to encourage development: lessons from the paradigm of the Millennium Development Goals’, DIIS report 2009:01, Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2009.
19 United Nations, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, New York: The Millennium Project, United Nations, 2005.
20 A Deaton, ‘Maximum prophet’, Lancet, 372, November 2008, pp 1535–1536.
21 P Antrobus, ‘MDGs—Most Distracting Gimmick’, DAWN Informs, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, September 2003, pp 6–8. She later accepted that the MDGs can be used to advance agendas aimed at the various dimensions of human poverty. See http://www.alliancemagazine.org/node/1387.
22 The very first global summit took place in 1972 in Stockholm, focused on the environment. To mark the occasion, the Club of Rome published the report Limits to Growth. Several more summits followed on subjects that were important to the developing world, eg hunger (1974), the status of the women (1975), employment and basic needs (1976), housing and shelter (1976) and science and technology (1979). Global summitry on development ceased when the ‘New International Economic Order’ became too polemical at the UN.
23 For an insider's view of how the MDGs came into being, see J Vandemoortele, ‘The MDG Story: Intention denied,' Development and Change, 42(1), 2011, pp 1–21.
24 Words used by the then US President, George HW Bush, in his address to the UN General Assembly on 11 September 1991—a decade before the creation of the MDGs and 10 years, exactly to the day, before 9/11.
25 J Vandemoortele, ‘The MDG conundrum: meeting the targets without missing the point’, Development Policy Review, 27(4), 2009, pp 355–371; and W Easterly, ‘How the Millennium Development Goals are unfair to Africa’, World Development, 37(1), 2009, pp 26–35.
26 The 1990 World Summit for Children, for instance, set the target for 2000 of reducing the under-five mortality rate by one-third or to a level of 70 per 1000 live births, whichever was greatest.
27 X Sala-i-Martin & M Pinkovskiy, African Poverty is Falling … Much Faster than You Think!, Working Paper No 15775, Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010.
28 They formed the basis on which Jan Tinbergen calculated the aid target for rich countries. Contrary to common belief, there is no relationship between the ODA target of 0.7 per cent and the resources required for achieving the MDGs.
29 The Economist, 25 September 2010, p 31.
30 Growing inequities and their importance are documented in A Minujin & E Delamonica, ‘Mind the gap! Widening child mortality disparities’, Journal of Human Development, 4(3), 2003, pp 396–418; K Moser, D Leon & D Gwatkin, ‘How does progress towards the child mortality millennium development goal affect inequalities between the poorest and the least poor? Analysis of demographic and health survey data’, British Medical Journal, 331, 2005, pp 1180–1183; D Reidpath, C Morel, J Mecaskey & P Allotey, ‘The Millennium Development Goals fail poor children: the case for equity-adjusted measures’, PLoS Med, 6(4), 2009; R Wilkinson & K Pickett, The Spirit Level, London: Penguin, 2010; and World Health Organisation, Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity Through Action on the Social Determinants of Health, Geneva: Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2008.
31 J Vandemoortele & E Delamonica, ‘Taking the MDGs beyond 2015: hasten slowly’, IDS Bulletin, 41(1), 2010, pp 60–69.
32 Britain's life expectancy increased the fastest during the years of the two world wars, when domestic solidarity and equity were at their strongest. See A Sen, ‘Mortality as an indicator of economic success and failure’, Innocenti Lectures, Florence: UNICEF, 1995.
33 Recently documented by, among others, N Kabeer, Can the MDGs Provide a Pathway to Social Justice? The Challenges of Intersecting Inequalities, IDS, 2010, at http://www.ids.ac.uk/index.cfm?objectid=D7AF033E-A15A-2AEB-6946038681E30AF9; UN Children's Fund, Narrowing the Gaps to Meet the Goals, New York: UNICEF, 2010; and Save the Children, A Fair Chance at Life: Why Equity Matters for Child Mortality, Save the Children report for the 2010 Summit on the Millennium Development Goals, International Save the Children Alliance, 2010.
34 Words used by the UN Secretary-General at the MDG review meeting in 2010. See http://www.un.org/apps/sg/sgstats.asp.
37 The fact that Melinda Gates was one of only two non-governmental and non-intergovernmental representatives who addressed the plenary session at the 2010 high-level MDG review at the UN General Assembly is symptomatic of the money-metric and donor-centric view of the MDG-agenda.