Introduction
So far in this series of columns I have covered the international discussion taking place on steps to secure the recovery of stolen public assets leading up to the recently concluded Third Conference on Financing for Development (FFD), held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last month. I went on to evaluate that Conference at this particular global conjuncture; stressing the very differing assessments of it provided by the United Nations, civil society, as well as developed and developing countries. It is important to note however, that the Conference should be situated in the context of present United Nations efforts to frame a post-2015 Development Agenda at its forthcoming summit scheduled for September 24-27, this year.
The recently concluded Third FFD Conference served as a prelude to the forthcoming United Nations September summit. And, furthermore the proposed December Conference of Parties to be held in Paris (CoP21) as a follow-up to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, UNCSD 2012 dealing with the environment, is seen as the final act in the framing of the Global Development Agenda for 2015-2030. The coming September United Nations Conference is expected to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030, SDGs), which will supersede the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, 2000-2015) arising out of the Millennium Develop-ment Summit held in 2000. In this sense therefore there are two processes at work: one is the follow-up to the MDGs, which come to an end this year; and, the other is the UNCSD 2012, follow-up.
Formally the post-2015 Development Agenda is expected to include four components. These are 1) a Declaration, which is a political statement of the vision and purpose of the agenda that all United Nations members will subscribe to; 2) the Sustainable Development Goals that are agreed to; 3) the Means of Implementation (MoI) of these goals and the global partnership arrived at to pursue these; and 4) a Monitoring and Review Mechanism (MRM) to secure and ensure the fulfilment of members’ commitments given at the United Nations Summit later in September. The MoI will be supported by the Third FFD Conference’s Action Agenda, known as the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA).
MDGs 2000-2015
The MDGs were established as the official output of United Nations Millennium Summit held in 2000. As readers would recall, the MDGs had eight agreed goals, namely: poverty alleviation; education; gender equality and empowerment of women; child and maternal health; environmental sustainability; reducing HIV/AIDS; reducing communicable diseases; and, building a global partnership for development. The target date that was set is end 2015.
Retrospectively, it can be observed that, by far, the MDGs greatest triumph has been in its mobilization of quite broad international support around the pursuit of its goals and their related targets. In practice, however, development analysts have identified three major weaknesses in these processes, which they believe the SDGs should seek to avoid at all costs.
First, and foremost the drafting of the goals and their targets for the MDGs were mainly derived from, and indeed the process was largely driven by, individual development experts or small groups of them. Clearly such an approach could not, and did not, sufficiently mobilize member countries of the global community in pursuit of these far-reaching efforts.
Secondly, the benefit of hindsight reveals that far too much emphasis has been placed on official transfers of finance, resources and technical assistance from rich to poor countries, (ODA). To be truthful, this was seen as the main driver of economic growth and development in poor countries. And, as a result, not only was the private sector and civil society downplayed in these efforts, but also the whole field of the domestic mobilization of resources in poor countries was not given real priority.
Thirdly, years later, it is now very clear that the emphasis on official transfers, was seen as distribution neutral, and/or biased towards the poor and needy. This was indeed very naïve. It only served to divert attention from growing inequalities between countries, and regions as well as within them. As the record now clearly shows, this unequal development has turned out to be one of the biggest obstacles to the promotion of broad based development in poor countries!
The current global situation
Although heavily based on a donor-recipient model of development, there is very little doubt that the MDGs brought major gains in 1) global poverty reduction; 2) the promotion of basic needs and welfare provision for large swathes of the global population; and 3) improvement of basic and primary services such as health, education, nutrition, skills training, recreation, sporting facilities and the status of children and women, in many countries and regions.
As a result of these developments the global situation has been substantially transformed; the material wellbeing of billions of persons has advanced; and, income poverty has declined. Alongside this, as I shall note later in more detail, many challenges remain to be tackled. It should be acknowledged though that the MDGs era has witnessed the world’s low income countries (LICs) enjoying the fastest and most widespread (or bottom-up) economic growth ever seen in the history of the world.
Among the many major global challenges that remain, are the relentless spread of global conflict and war; exceptional rates of political and economic migration; rapid growth in youth unemployment; challenges of breakup of rural societies and the rapid spread of urbanization; climate change and its devastating consequences. Added to these, as we have seen in earlier columns the ODA target (0.7% of Gross National Income) set by the development community has not been met, in the main. Concern over rising inequality between countries and regions and within them has risen exponentially. Further, these are now intermingled with challenges of natural resources depletion, violence, and especially for our purposes, rapidly growing corruption in its many forms.
Next week I shall continue from this observation.
