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The Millennium Development Goals: Moving towards a post 2015 agenda
23 March 2010 – Andy Sumner
As IDS co-hosts a symposium on the Millennium Development Goals and Human Rights at Harvard this week, IDS Fellow Andy Sumner argues that despite caution, it's time to start thinking beyond the 2015 deadline.
The UN MDG summit in September this year will be the climax of the 2010 MDG review process which will ask questions about what needs to be done the same, or differently, in terms of policy actions, institutional reforms and resourcing in order to sustain and accelerate MDG progress. What the review will not focus directly on is what should replace the MDGs in 2015.
Despite some cautiousness of discussing the issue publically (based on a sense that it might detract from MDG efforts to 2015) debates on the issue are beginning to emerge. For example in academic writings, research hubs and reviews, in global CSO meetings and privately in donor agencies and elsewhere.
There are good reasons why such post-2015 debates are useful and consistent with supporting poverty reduction efforts via the MDGs and the current context allows us to take stock, discuss what the MDGs have achieved and why, and start thinking about what (if anything) should be the 'MDG-Plus' (post-MDG) architecture. For example, the core concerns of the MDGs - nutrition, health, education - are likely to remain valid after 2015 in some way; there is still considerable time to set in place a global process of deliberation (and the political momentum to build such compacts is enormous – at present we can’t even take for granted there will be any post-2015 framework) and the economic crisis and its aftermath present an opportunity to rethink progress and indicators as the Sarkozy Commission noted recently.
The debate around what, if anything, should succeed the MDGs is still in its very early stages. There is only limited empirical evidence around the impact of the MDGs so far on which to base any conclusions, and the parameters of what we want the MDGs to do, and for whom, are not yet set. It is also a debate which may prove to be purely theoretical unless strong political momentum develops behind the assertion that there is a need for any successor agreement to the MDGs.
At the MDG and Human Rights Symposium at Harvard University this week we shall be pursuing these debates.
What is needed next is a global discussion facilitated by an independent commission that will: coordinate a genuinely global process of roundtables and voices of the poor; develop an evidence-base for what works and how to proceed and a review on the economics or cost of global poverty. But with less than five years to go until the deadline, it's a discussion that needs to happen soon.
Andy Sumner is a Research Fellow with the Vulnerablility and Poverty Reduction Team at IDS.
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Related Publications
- Sumner, A. and Melamed, C. (2010) 'The MDGs and Beyond', IDS Bulletin 41.1, Brighton: IDS
- Sumner, A. et al (2009) 'After 2015: Promoting Pro-Poor Policy After the MDGs', IDS In Focus Policy Briefings 9, Brighton: IDS
