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The Millennium Development Goals: Indicators, ideas or incentives?
Andy Sumner- 16 October 2009
World Food Day, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and The UN Millennium Campaign ‘Stand Up: Take Action’ are all opportunities for those committed to ending world poverty to call on world leaders to deliver promises made as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Next year the UN reviews the MDGs progress to date - what will it find?
The current landscape
While the MDGs have had a significant impact so far at a global level, impacts at national levels need more exploration. A study by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr of the New School, New York, found that it is far from clear that the MDGs are systemically integrated into countries national development strategies, PRSP or donor country level documents. However, in a the more recent UNDP study of 30 countries, no fewer than 25 countries had added, expanded or modified indicators and 10 had added local goals.
There is considerable interest in new thinking around poverty and wellbeing concepts and indicators illustrated by initiatives such as the OECD Measuring the Progress of Societies Project, the Sarkozy Commission, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) research programme and UNU WIDER Frontiers of Poverty Analysis programme. There is also the UN MDG conference and the newly established annual European Development Report on the MDGs and Beyond – both opportunities for MDG advocates to increase momentum.
Preparing for the ‘big push’
2010-2015 indicates a ‘big push’ for the MDGs and the key issues concerned are cross-cutting ones: We need more focus on strengthening the links between the Rights agenda in the Millennium Declaration and the MDGs; more on gender (and the new UN agency), more on poor people’s adaptation to climate change, and more on equity and social justice issues (and the poorest).We urgently need answers on some of the political questions. For example, why is there clear evidence in some countries of national 'ownership' of the MDGs and little in others? Can the global political momentum that led to the MDGs be maintained and renewed in an uncertain world with aid and public expenditure under pressure?
A rallying call…or a donor-led reductionist agenda?
Research and thinking on the MDGs has tended to be polarized - you either love them or hate them. Advocates of the MDG approach believe it provides a rallying call for placing multi-dimensional poverty reduction at the centre of development efforts. The MDGs are thus viewed as a set of indicators for guiding poverty reduction and for holding international agencies and governments accountable to citizens. Those less convinced see the MDG approach, however, a donor-led, reductionist agenda that pays little attention to locally defined and owned definitions of progress and development.
The MDGs are different things to different people. They are a set of indicators, but they are also an idea or ‘global norm’ for poverty reduction, an incentive structure for pro-poor development and a view of ‘development’ in themselves. We need to know if and how international poverty conventions are used at a country level or not in poverty reduction efforts.
Perhaps then, the defining question is how do global agreements and conventions change poor people’s lives?
New areas for research and thinking
If we pursue the question of what the MDGs are – an idea, a set of indicators, an incentive structure – we can propose some important new areas for research and thinking to reduce poverty and how to purse it:
(a) on ideas and how the global political momentum on the MDGs was built and can be maintained in a different world;
(b) on indicators and how more could be made of linking the MDGs to vulnerability/resilience, to children/inter-generational issues and to better integrating these dimensions via the emergent ‘wellbeing lens’ which implies different types of social protection that are child- sensitive;
(c) on incentives and country-level politics and why have some countries adopted and adapted policy and allocated resources based on the MDGs whilst others have not?
The answers to these questions will be crucial in achieving the MDGs and long run global poverty reduction to the MDGs and beyond. IDS and partners will be suggesting solutions in a special issue of the IDS Bulletin and at an MDG Roundtable in New York planned for January 2010.
Andy Sumner is a Fellow with the Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction Team
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Related Events
After 2015: Promoting pro-poor policy after the MDGs
Dates: 23 Jun 2009
What happens when we no longer have the MDGs? How will we promote pro-poor policy after 2015?
Just some of the questions to be answered at this high level policy forum in Brussels.
Related Publications
- Sumner, A. and Tiwari, M. (2009) After 2015: International Development Policy at a Crossroads, London: Palgrave Macmillan
- Sumner, A. et al (2009) 'After 2015: Promoting Pro-Poor Policy After the MDGs', IDS In Focus Policy Briefings 9, Brighton: IDS
