by Alex Evans | Apr 16, 2012 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global Dashboard, Global system, Influence and networks
Following the British government’s announcement that David Cameron will be one of the co-chairs of the UN’s forthcoming High Level Panel on what should follow the Millennium Development Goals after they expire in 2015, we’ve been setting out some thoughts about the design principles of any new set of goals. Last week, David set out some of the criteria that will make for an effective set of goals. So what about the actual content of the goals?
Amid widespread enthusiasm for the new idea of Sustainable Development Goals (see this briefing), there’s a marked lack of clarity about what such goals would actually look like: what they’d cover, how they’d work, how they’d relate to the existing MDGs and so on. Some people want to see environmental considerations like planetary boundaries in the new framework. Others want to see enabling conditions for development, like growth or governance. Lots of people are talking about access to energy as an area where a new goal could be agreed. Lots of others would love to see a new goal on reducing inequality.
Before the SDGs debate goes much further, these kinds of debate need to become a lot more structured if we’re to avoid getting a ‘Christmas tree’ of goals (weighed down with everyone’s baubles, lacking focus or any sense of priorities). So what are the key questions we need answers to, and in what order should we be asking them? Here’s our take on the five core questions that will shape the post-2015 agenda:
- Do we need new goals at all? Not enough people have stopped to ask whether new goals are really needed in the first place. But it’s essential that the approach to post-2015 be thought through from first principles: the case for new goals won’t be persuasive unless it sets out clearly why it is that quantified targets are likely to be an effective tool to accelerate development or increase sustainability, especially given that evidence for the impact of the existing MDGs isn’t conclusive.
- Should goals be universal? The current MDGs are designed to apply to the world’s most vulnerable people – in other words, about a billion of them if you use $1.25 a day of income as the benchmark, or 2 billion at $2 a day. Should a new set of goals continue with this basic principle? Or should it take a radically different approach, and aim for goals that would be genuinely global in coverage – in other words applying to 7 billion rather than 1 billion people?
- How broad should goals be? New goals after 2015 could be tightly defined (a small set of headline targets in a few specific sectors, say), fully comprehensive (covering all aspects of society, economy, and the environment), or somewhere in between (like the current MDGs, which cover a representative set of issues).
- Do we need one, or more than one, framework? While an all-singing, all-dancing package of SDGs would logically subsume MDGs, it’s also possible to imagine slimmed down SDGs living alongside revised MDGs (‘twin tracks’), or a variety of hybrid models (a loose ‘family’ of goals, that could apply just to poor countries or be universal in nature).
- Should the framework be binding? The MDGs were designed to be global targets – not to apply to individual countries. While many donors have increasingly tracked MDG progress at country level (and some countries have incorporated them into law or in some cases even the constitution), it’s also the case that the MDGs probably couldn’t have been agreed if they had imposed binding obligations on governments. So should future goals be applied at national as well as global level? And should they define rights or desired outcomes?
Depending on how you answer these questions, you end up at one of a range of different kinds of outcome:
Full SDGs – universal, comprehensive, covering all 7 billion of us and with nationally specific targets – have some momentum right now. But it’s hard to see major powers signing up: India’s against, China’s keeping quiet for now, and it’s hard to see the US agreeing to anything that looks like global direction of the US’s domestic agenda. Don’t hold your breath.
SDGs-lite – which is where we might end up if the full SDGs agenda gets progressively diluted (e.g. controversial goals get dropped; targets become aspirational or voluntary and fail to be matched with a hard-edged delivery plan). This option runs the risk of failing to satisfy anyone (governments, campaigners, the media) – while also losing the MDGs’ focus on the poorest.
MDGs Plus – This option would start from the core MDG principle of focusing on the poorest, but built outwards from there. The risk is that reopening the framework could lead to a ‘Christmas tree’ outcome. But strong leadership could also keep the agenda tight – perhaps complementing goals with a set of key capabilities open to peer review.
Hybrids – Another option would be to combine SDGs and MDGs in a hybrid – for example, the approach proposed by Oxfam’s Kate Raworth. This approach would allow an evolutionary approach under which the poverty elements of the goals would be agreed early on in the process – thus safeguarding the MDGs’ poverty focus before moving on to the politically more challenging ground of sustainability goals.
Car crash – Finally, of course, it could all go pear-shaped. This is a risk that deserves to be taken very seriously indeed; after all, it’s not as though the last few years are short of example of sustainability and climate summits going wrong in one way or another. Remember: the MDGs took ten years to emerge, during a period of history that was a lot more warm and fuzzy than today’s context – and the MDGs were politically much easier than goals on politically charged areas like sustainable consumption. A car crash scenario could lead to the loss of the MDGs’ poverty focus with no countervailing win in another area.
(This post is based on a forthcoming Brookings paper by David and I on the post-2015 challenge, which will be published in the next few days.)
by Alex Evans | Jan 23, 2012 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system
Later today in New York, a 2 day meeting on the idea of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ will begin, bringing together numerous countries’ Permanent Representatives to the United Nations plus a whole host of environment and development experts from capitals. It’s going to be an interesting meeting.
The idea of ‘SDGs’, after all, has acquired a lot of political momentum in recent months. Partly that’s because they’re seen as a potential outcome from this summer’s Rio+20 sustainable development conference – at a point when very few concrete outcomes from Rio appear to be in prospect (see the ‘zero draft outcome document’ pdf that was published earlier this month). The SDGs agenda is also topical given that the Millennium Development Goals are due to hit their 2015 deadline pretty soon, raising the question of what should come after them. (See Claire’s excellent recent publications, like this and this, on that for a full briefing on where things stand on that front.)
But the funny thing is that there’s remarkably little clarity on what SDGs would cover, or how they’d work. Would they just run from now to 2015, alongside the existing MDGs, and cover a few ‘gaps’ that were missed out in the MDGs – like access to energy? Or would they in fact take over from the MDGs after 2015, thus becoming the new organising framework for global development policy? These are big questions – and at a time, of course, when multilateralism has really been struggling to make much running not just on Rio preparations, but also on climate, trade, and any number of other key issue areas.
Against this backdrop, David and I have just published a short CIC briefing paper (pdf) that discusses where we are on the SDGs agenda – and how it might usefully pan out from here. In a nutshell, our argument is that policymakers should think twice before regarding SDGs as an “easy win” from Rio. We argue that this is a very complex and potentially very contentious area of policy – and that policymakers should play a long game at this stage rather than going for quick wins that could all too easily backfire. Accordingly, we think that discussion of SDGs at Rio should go no further than discussion of broad principles and raising the level of ambition. A lot more shared awareness – not just between policymakers, but also with publics, private sector, media, civil society and so on – is needed before the discussion about specifics gets underway in earnest.
by Claire Melamed | Dec 7, 2011 | Economics and development, Global system
Pardon the existential angst, but as I’m about to spend the next few years of my life obsessing about what comes after the MDGs, and as the same question is finally aired in the UN’s General Assembly, I’m having a moment of – not quite doubt but certainly wondering – what exactly would a new agreement on development after 2015 be for?
There is, to say the least a certain fuzziness about this question among those (like me, let’s be honest here) who are regularly to be found airing our views on the subject. It seems to me there are three possible, not necessarily mutually exclusive, reasons to have a new agreement on development post-2015. Each implies a different pathway from a global agreement to changes in actual people’s real lives – which is after all the whole point of the exercise..
Firstly, there’s the resources track. For many people the main benefit of the current set of MDGs has been the impetus they provided for increases in aid budgets among traditional donors, with the promises made at the 2005 G8 in Gleneagles probably the high point. The causality is simple: MDGs provide the objectives, the achievement of which can then be costed, the aid provided, the objectives reached. Bingo. So would a new agreement be all about mobilising resources for development? Maybe for some – the contribution made by China on behalf of the G77 to the General Assembly discussions last week was at least in part about aid, and also talked about trade and technology transfer, other examples of how a new agreement could be used to give developing countries something from the OECD that they don’t already have.
It’s easy to see why that might seem like the most important thing, given the current fears about declining aid budgets among traditional donors. But a post-2015 agreement that was all about aid wouldn’t chime very well with current thinking about what’s important for development, within low income as much as high income countries. (more…)
by Claire Melamed | Nov 14, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system
Sustainable Development: more than just windmills?
A few months ago, the Colombian government created what passed for excitement among international climate and development types, with its proposal for ‘sustainable development goals’. In a paper that is surprisingly short given the talk it’s generated, they proposed a set of goals which, in essence, incorporate the current Millennium Development Goals, but go well beyond them in including a range of possible goals on sustainability and the environment.
At the time, Alex raised a set of important questions here on GD about the what, the who and the how of any future SDGs. And over at CGD, Charles Kenny made a plea for the SDG and the MDG people to start talking to each other to provide some of the substance to underpin these ideas.
And since then? Global negotiations are funny things. In the absence of almost any of the substance that Charles was asking for, and without answers to any of the questions posed by Alex, the SDGs have continued their onward march. Representatives of thirty countries recently met in Bogata to agree some objectives for SDGs, based around reconciling poverty reduction and sustainability.
The SDG train has clearly left the station – even though no one really knows what they are. This is a little disheartening for innocent folk like me who like to believe that facts matter (yeah, I know, hopelessly outdated – I may as well be writing this on a Smith-Corona).
Given that no one really knows what SDGs are, but they sound good and people seem to like them, what might they actually be? Where is the meeting ground between environment and development that could form the basis of a set of goals, and what difference would it make to go about things this way?
Putting sustainability into poverty reduction:
If the MDG project has been about putting forward a set of positive things that need to happen for poor people: more money, more health, more education, what are the sustainability goals that could fit into this sort of framework? The things we need more of, from a sustainability and a development point of view, are, among others, more clean energy, more sustainable sources of water, and more food grown in ways that does not irrevocably deplete natural resources. These are things one could imagine putting into a new set of goals to go alongside the more traditional MDG concerns of health, education and income. Some of them, like water, are even in there already, though almost ignored.
So far so good, but the poverty reduction bit is actually the easy bit. (more…)
by Claire Melamed | Nov 2, 2011 | Articles and Publications, Reports
Debate has started in earnest about what should come after the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015. This paper from ODI and UNDP, authored by Claire Melamed and Andy Sumner, summarises the evidence on the impact of the MDGs, looks at current trends in poverty and in global governance that will affect the shape and the scope of any future agreement on global development.
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