A Post-2015 Global Development Agreement: why, what, who?1 Claire Melamed & Andy Sumner
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A Post-2015 Global Development Agreement: why, what, who?
This text was written by Claire Melamed and Andy Sumner for the Overseas Development Institute in preparation for the October 2011 Cairo Workshop on the future of the MDGs beyond 2015.
Brief history of the MDGs
The MDGs represent a global consensus on the best way to tackle poverty and a political agreement about the level of accountability governments are willing to be submitted to . They were intended to be as global targets and were established on the basis of global trends and were never intended to be applied to individual countries, which they were at the end. Global level indicators for the first 7 MDGs have improved since 1990 and one is very “off-track”(maternal mortality). But national averages mask inequalities between countries.
Beyond 2015
In a context of global crisis and poverty, an agreement post-2015 will need to have multiple objectives such as incentivise appropriate action on development, to be effective at inspiring global actions and to be useable as a monitoring framework that is appropriate to present realities.
Components of a new framework:
A new agreement will be a set of incentives to encourage action on certain issues by presenting certain instruments. Aid as an incentive to the issue of social development might no longer be relevant according to the authors. One of the most pressing issues in the world is the lack of jobs and the instruments to fix it are mainly at the national-level. A global agreement could boost technology transfer, trade and intellectual property by basing itself on donor-recipient countries’s set of priorities inspired by a monitoring framework. As stated earlier, aid might not be the best incentive to boost progress around the world since a significative number of the worlds’s poor live in middle income countries. How to tackle the barriers to poverty reduction in middle-income countries is to be determined and is relevant for any post-2015 framework.
The targets and goals approach implement in the MDGs is not the only way to encourage change and progress at the global and national levels. States could agree on binding targets to be attained while being monitored on their compliance by an international organization or a NGO. That will imply a limit on their sovereignty but it has been successfully applied. The leagues tables approacj of the UNDP’s Human Development Report or the prize awarded by the Mo Ibrahim approach are pertinent approaches too.
Reconciliating national realities and global targets:
The fact that MDGs were used for national-level monitoring was unfair to many countries (mostly from Africa) because they were set for a Global level measurement, argue Melamed and Sumner. Many experts argue that a new agreement should be built up from national level goals. For that to be effective, it will have to conciliate national level accountability and global equity. Furthermore a new global agreement will need to be agreed by politics and ensure that the obligations/targets will be honoured by the signatories. But the possibility that there will be no new agreement is still looming, given the context of economic crisis.
See also
- Stiglitz Commission
- United Nations Development Programme
- Overseas Development Institute
- Millennium Development Goals
References
Claire Melamed & Andy Sumner. A Post-2015 Global Development Agreement: why, what, who?.Overseas Development Institute and United Nations Development Programme. http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/docs/7369.pdf.
