Institute of Development Studies

What should the 2010 UN MDG Review do?

Andy Sumner - 25 January 2010

2010 is a big year for the UN and for the MDGs. The UN meets in September 2010 with the participation of Heads of State and Government to review the MDGs and create a plan to reach them.

Maintaining global and national political momentum on the MDGs in difficult times for aid and public expenditure will be important. Amid the numerous discussions what should the UN MDG review actually try to do?

Four aspects of the MDGs and pro-poor policy need attention and rethinking.

Lessons learnt: The review should take stock by assessing the impact of the MDGs so far – good and bad

The MDGs have had significant positive impacts but have faced some criticisms. There is clear evidence of the impact of the MDGs at a global level and amongst donors but at country level impacts are less clear.

In the recent UNDP (2009) study of 30 countries, 25 countries had added, expanded or modified indicators and 10 had added local goals. However, other studies have found the MDGs less systematically integrated into national developments strategies (and donor country plans) than one might expect.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the MDGs?

Strengths

• as a 'rallying call' for development actors
• as a common/shared understanding of what development is seeking to   achieve (and the placing of poverty reduction at the centre of development rather than GDP growth alone)
• as a set of useful targets and indicators to guide and motivate development policy decisions, and at the same time – in principle –  the accountability that flows from saying you will do something and then measuring if you have done it
• the pressure they have exerted for more data on poverty
• their legitimacy because they are UN-based, and have an in-built sense of global solidarity and ability to galvanize the international community in development as a joint-project

Weaknesses

• their struggling in defining what poverty and development is as incomplete human development outcomes alone rather than capabilities/opportunities to achieve those outcomes, and inter-related, their lack of pathology (or conceptual rigour) in that they have no unifying theory on the underlying or structural causes of poverty and thus lack a pathology/means for poverty reduction beyond inputs/outcomes
• their weakness on social justice underpinnings - the MDGs are implicitly inter-generational (note the 25 year timeline 1990-2015; and many of the MDGs are about children) - but there is very limited attention to intra-generational or inter-generational equity and rights issues such as inequalities, marginalization, vulnerability and exclusion
• a perception that they are a donor-led agenda that pays little attention to locally defined and owned (and richer, fuller) definitions of progress and  development
• their overemphasis of material wellbeing  - and a lack attention on how what people feel and think in part determines what they can do and be
• their potentially distorting impacts – i.e. targeting of the near poor (easier to help and reach) rather than the most poor
• the world has changed since the MDGs were first launched. We now need something more in tune with vulnerability and resilience to contemporary issues such as climate adapation, and volatile markets for food and fuel.

The ‘Mega-MDG Plan’: The review should develop a credible, funded, five year plan with clear roles and mechanisms at country level – policies to make the MDGs unmissable

President Obama has said, 'We will support the MDGs, and approach next year's summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time'. This is exactly what the 2010 MDG review must do. Far less ideal, would be to focus on 1-2 goals and try and make real progress on plans to attain those goals with real money and policy coherence. The contents of that plan would include:

Real-time poverty monitoring systems via the UN GIVAS platform - currently MDG data is at least two to four years out of date; this also needs to take much more account of equity and the poorest groups and gender equality systematically.

Clear mechanisms for much greater MDG country-level localisation - in governments in public expenditure planning; in policy formation and in policy implementation, and so on - UNDP is preparing improved country level implementation plans and an MDG index of policy effort.

Clarity on global and national roles and the division of labour - who’s going to do what and what is the role of different actors; who’s funding what, and so on.

A spotlight on the inter-connectedness of policy intervention - there's limited success in health if there's poor nutrition and water and sending poor, malnourished children to school won't achieve too much. IDS research has found that that cross-cutting issues matter but they have had limited emphasis to date – for example, gender, rights, livelihood and resilience.  The MDGs need to track the poorest 20% and gender equality needs to be applied systematically across all of the goals.  Also, the MDGs are mostly about children so why not put them at the centre?

Build political momentum for 2015: The review should create a global process for a new development consensus – via the establishment of an independent global commission led by someone like Brazil’s President Lula da Silva.

The MDGs took ten years - a decade of momentum - and a small group of 'insiders' backed by powerful actors to get off the ground. The context has also changed – there are more middle-income countries and much greater range of funders and opportunities to raise funds through alternative and innovative sources of finance; a rise in the importance of the G20; a difficult context post-crisis for aid/public expenditures; the risks of climate change to achievement of many MDGs; demographic change; and a growing recognition of both the benefits and the challenges posed by technology.

We need a truly global participatory process which might have several strands. But what would process of this kind do?

• Co-ordinate a genuinely global, process of roundtables, voices of the poor, blogging, and multimedia communications of critical issues.
• Convene an international meeting on a 'new development consensus' that would become an evidence-base for what works and how to proceed with global poverty reduction in a changing climate in a much more holistic way.
• Conduct a review on the economics or cost of global poverty – in which the story would be that it’s cheaper to address the causes of poverty now that the cost of the consequences later.

If there is to be a framework for after 2015 that is based on a global discussion it needs to start soon.

Andy Sumner is a Research Fellow with the Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction Team at IDS.

This article is a reproduction of his contribution to the 2010 UN MDG Review: What to do differently? What to do the same? event blog  on the UN Millennium Campaign website.

You can also follow coverage of the event by visiting Twitter and searching the tag #mdgsreview.

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'The 2010 UN MDG Review: What to do differently? What to do the same?'

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Related Video

Related Publications

• Sumner, A. and Tiwari, M. (2008) After 2015: International Development Policy at a Crossroads (Rethinking International Development), Palgrave Macmillan
• Sumner, A. et al (2009) 'After 2015: Promoting Pro-Poor Policy After the MDGs', IDS In Focus Policy Briefings 9, Brighton: IDS
• Sumner, A. and Melamed, C. (2010) 'The MDGs and Beyond', IDS Bulletin 41.1, Brighton: IDS