Whither the post-MDG development agenda?

Posted byMark Tran Friday 15 July 2011 12.02 BSTguardian.co.uk

Ahead of the 2015 deadline for the millennium development goals, the debate about future targets is gathering momentum

Wellbeing and happiness may colour the future development agenda, but will the pursuit of more nebulous goals be a good thing? Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

While the world is on track to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty, meeting the other targets contained in the millennium development goals (MDGs) would be a Herculean task.

The overall poverty rate is expected to fall below 15% by 2015, fulfilling the target of the first MDG of halving the proportion of people living on less than $1 per day. That in itself is a remarkable achievement. Yet, as the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, acknowledged earlier this month, the world needs to look beyond 2015, even though progress on the MDGs has been fitful.

"When the MDGs were first articulated, we knew that achieving them would, in a sense, be only half the job," he said. "We knew that too many men, women and children would go largely untouched by even our best efforts. That is why we are already working with all our
partners to sustain the momentum and to carry on with an ambitious post-2015 development agenda."

With four years left until the 2015 deadline, suggestions abound as to what that agenda should be. Some of them received an airing this week at a discussion held in Parliament. Kudakwashe Dube, chief executive of the Secretariat of the African Decade of Persons with Disabilities, made the practical point that people with disabilities should be taken into account in any post-2015 framework, as they were not included in the MDGs at all.

"The voices of the poor did not come through in the MDGs and those of disability [were] left out completely," he said. "Our hope post-2015 is that there will be a strong focus on human rights and how disabilities related to them."

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), about 15% of the world's population - or 1 billion - lives with some form of disability. The global prevalence of disability, said a WHO report in June, is higher than previous figures, which date from the 1970s and suggested a number around 10%. The WHO said the MDGs may not be met by 2015 unless urgent action is taken to address the needs of people with disabilities.

Few would quarrel with Dube's plea to put people with disabilities on the agenda, but devising broader targets means moving on to trickier ground. As the Lancet pointed out in an excellent report last September, the MDGs were effectively a synthesis of neoliberal thinking (economic growth based on free trade and markets) and a human development approach (health, education and gender equity). Backed by 189 governments, the targets represented an unprecedented consensus and were more successful than previous UN development initiatives. But the ambitious nature of the undertaking meant omissions were inevitable. The Lancet notes that the absence of focus on equity could be the most serious shortcoming of the MDGs, a point that has also been made on the Poverty Matters blog by Jonathan Glennie. The multilateral institutions have belatedly recognised that unless growth is inclusive, countries are storing up trouble for later, as borne out by Tunisia and Egypt, to cite the most dramatic examples.

Taking a provocative approach, Professor Allister McGregor, research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, said in this week's debate that the MDGs were not fit for 2015. He argued for putting the notion of wellbeing into the next phase and for more sophisticated ways of looking at poverty. The MDGs, he said, had provided good momentum but the world needed to move beyond targets.

"Poor people are not just defined by poverty," he said. "They have aspirations ... we need to ask: what do you want to achieve and what are the obstacles that systematically frustrate you?"

Referring to the Arab spring, McGregor said the events in north Africa underlined the importance of trying to incorporate the concept of wellbeing, as prosperity without freedom had proved destabilising. He also cited the contrast between Bangkok and the poor rural northeast, where farmers were committing suicide because they had fallen into debt.

"It's basically about inequality, how we live well together and how we share wealth," said McGregor. "Let's get it on the agenda and have people work on wellbeing. We have to start coming up with new ideas on how we measure what we value."

McGregor summed up wellbeing in an IDS report in 2009 as what a person has, what a person can do with what they have, and how they think about what they have and can do. It also involves the interplay of the resources a person is able to command: what they are able to achieve with those resources, what needs and goals they can meet, and the meaning they give to the goals they achieve and the processes in which they engage.

The notions of wellbeing and happiness are being taken increasingly seriously by governments, so it would not be surprising if they are taken into account in the post-MDG phase. The Stiglitz commission in France recommended in 2009 that statistical surveys should "incorporate questions to capture people's life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities" and last year the British prime minister David Cameron started work with the Office for National Statistics on how to measure wellbeing.

But as former Scottish first minister Baron McConnell warned, there is a risk that the pursuit of more ambitious and nebulous goals will let governments off the hook.

"If you want to pin governments down, you need precise targets," he said.