To MDG or not to MDG? Claire Melamed
April 28, 2011 | More on Economics and development, Global system | 2 comments
Which is the title of a presentation I’ve just given at a conference on global health and the MDGs in Copenhagen. The powerpoint’s not up yet, but the main points were:
1. The MDGs should not be confused with an ’8 commandments of development’. They’re criticised for not saying everything there is to say about development, but this is missing the point. They represent an international agreement on some joint actions and responsibilities which reflect an understanding of what the main problems were in the late 1990s and where international cooperation could usefully be part of the solution. A post-2015 agreement should do the same, for a different era of development.
2. The MDGs have created a new incentive structure for donor governments in particular, and so have distorted behaviour. Some would argue, for example, that the focus on increasing the numbers of children in school has been at the cost of the quality of education – but numbers were the MDG target, so that’s where the money and the attention went (to be fair, it’s not just the MDGs that focused on quantity over quality – just about every other education campaign and report did the same). Any post-2015 agreement would do this too – that’s the point of it. The question is what actions, and by who, we want to incentivise.
3. A post-2015 agreement will be delivered through different aid architecture. The world can’t be divided into rich donor countries and poor recipient countries any more – most poor people live in countries that are both donor and recipient, or neither. So the politics of agreeing it, and the structure for implementing it, would have to be different.
4. And the problems we face are different. To take just two examples, poverty is increasingly urban, so development’s rural bias will have to go, and diseases are increasingly of the non-communicable kind (heart disease, diabetes and the like), rather than the infectious diseases that were the focus of the MDGs (not that these have gone away).
5. And our understanding of what ‘development’ is and how to measure it has changed, informed by the ideas of ‘wellbeing’ or of ‘multidimensional poverty’, among others. We have new ideas about instruments to help bring it about - with social protection perhaps the most current example. The importance of politics looms much larger in development thinking than in the 1990s – though we probably still don’t quite know what to do with that insight.
So it’s complicated. It was always complicated, but the more we know the more complicated it seems. Out of this tangle (hence the string – I’m feeling rather literal today), a post-2015 agreement would need to have the same simplicity and political power as the MDGs, if it’s to be an agreement that governments can use with electorates, NGOs with governments, journalists to their editors and so on.
A tough call. What are the choices?
- keep the MDGs with an extended timeline (not appealing – rather a missed opportunity to reframe the ideas and incentives for a different world)
- keep the structure, but with (some) different targets and a new timeline (this would all depend on keeping the targets within manageable limits – a shopping list approach wouldn’t work for anyone)
- a new structure – possibly framed around global public goods or some other principle (the least likely politically, though in some ways the most apprppriate)
Or of course, nothing at all. It’s perfectly likely that attempts to reach international consensus around shared responsiblity for a set of defined poverty problems will be too difficult and will be quitely dropped. Before we get too deeply into a technical discussion on the what and the how of any new agreement, maybe we should remember that any agreement at all may well be the real prize.
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I'd vote for door number two. Keep the structure and expand the SMART [specific, measurable, achievable & realistic, time-based] goals.
I have noticed that the climate community is evolving. At first they emphasized just energy goals, and climate; but ignored the fact that climate will hit, IS HITTING, the poorest of the world the first and the worst. That is changing.
The development community, however, isn't asking questions about how we will live on an earth with finite resources. It feels like many of them would like everyone in the world to live just like folks in the northern, rich countries; and are in denial over the impossibility of that.
Both the environment AND development communities are silent on militarism and the threat it poses to both of their agendas. This is esp. true of the foundation and government funded parts of those communities– that is, the vast bulk.
The peace community, meanwhile, is focused on crisis after crisis, and addicted to endless reaction instead of pro-active response. Furthermore, it is split into wings which don't recognize one another: mediation, grassroots peace activity, world order & disarmament.
What is needed is to break down the siloes and comfortable tribes in which people unproductively hang out. A revised set of MDGs [perhaps 12, but not 25] could keep the old ones, but bring in goals on
• military spending and nuclear disarmament
• green economics & northern overconsumption
• environment and ecology, expanded from the one token goal that is part of the eight
• human rights, democracy and elections
I salute the efforts of Mohan Munasinghe to further the idea of the Millennium Consumption Goals & am glad to see this article as well. A fellow named Hulme has some good writings on the origins of the Millennium Development Goals. He documents just how very human the people who came up with these were. They didn't come down from God.
I also want to endorse the concept of the MDGs as ambitious stretch goals. Previously, unrealistic goals were lauded by many and ignored by all ["Let's make this the decade in which we abolish hunger!!"].
By trying to downscale expectations and create stretch goal targets, many of which might actually be met; the MDGs teach us that acting together as one species we CAN do more together than just join in watching royal weddings [Were there really two billion of the seven of us watching that? I wasn't.]
The MDGs were successful in setting a framework for what success might look like.
They were perhaps more successful as a global framework than a country framework. The poorest countries were never going to achieve the MDGs because the targets were a benchmark for the average county. Countries which have made rapid progress in terms of what was possible have been labelled as failures.
The MDGs may have been great at mobilising aid in 2000 – 2005, but in 2010 – 15 they risk undermining support for aid as they are mistakenly leading to the conclusion that aid does work. People don't see that that a. there was not enough aid or b. the targets were not realistic, as the main problems.
Donors which support the MDGs have been reluctant to open up the debate on what's next as it will take the eye off the ball on achieving the MDGs now. Those which don't support them have been reluctant to open the debate because they don't want it. Are the chances of a new framework better than the chances of completing the Doha Development Agenda/WTO Round. A tough call!