With five years left before 2015, world leaders are meeting in New York this September to take stock of the progress and gaps in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. But, however laudable, the MDG effort is poised for failure—above all, for skirting the structural issues at the root of global poverty.

In September 2000, leaders of 189 countries that were assembled for the United Nations (UN) Millennium Summit in New York signed on to the Millennium Declaration. In it, member-states reaffirm their commitment to realizing the goals agreed upon in various UN summits and conferences over the 1990s. Commitments were made in the areas of the environment, human rights, peace, and strengthening the UN. The best-known commitments, though, are those for development and poverty
reduction, which contained goals explicitly setting 2015 as the deadline year.

From these commitments were derived set of goals called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were presented by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan before the UN General Assembly in September 2001.[1] In its latest form, the MDGs consist of eight goals that break down into 21 quantifiable targets and 60 indicators. The eight goals are: 1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; 2) Achieve universal primary education; 3) Promote gender equality and empower women; 4) Reduce child mortality; 5) Improve maternal health; 6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; 7) Ensure environmental sustainability, and; 8) Develop a global partnership for development. Although widely accepted and endorsed, these targets are non-binding.

Patchy progress
A report of the UN Secretary-General released in February 2010 describes the progress in achieving the MDGs as “a mixed picture of shortfalls and successes.”[2] Progress is uneven across regions and countries, with a few doing better than many others. Results are not homogenous across the MDG board as well.

For instance, progress in meeting the MDGs’ most famous target!halving the proportion of people living in extreme income poverty, defined as $1.25 per day by the World Bank!is much more modest than is usually claimed. In 2005, there were still about 1.4 billion people living below $1.25 per day, down from 1.8 billion in 1990. Without China, where most of the reduction occurred, the number actually increased by 36 million; and by 80 million from 1981 if the rapidly growing economies of Brazil, India, and Russia, too, were excluded.[3] Poverty incidence remains above 50% in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the population of the extremely poor swelled by as much as a third between 1990 and 2005.

The figures for other dimensions of poverty are also not encouraging. The world’s hungry population is on the rise. In 2009, 1.02 billion people were in hunger, up from 842 million in 1990-1992. 129 million children were underweight, and 195 million under the age of five were stunted. Meanwhile, in  2008, an estimated 633 million workers!or about a fifth of the world’s working population!were earning less than $1.25 per person per day for their families. And the share of the poorest of the world’s income is falling. In 1990, the ratio of the per capita income in the richest 20 countries to that in the poorest 20 was $42 to one dollar; in 2005, it was $59 to one dollar.[4]

What are we doing wrong? The question staring governments and the UN in the face is why, despite the popular awareness, high-level commitment, and celebrity enthusiasm generated around the MDGs, the world is still far behind in achieving them.

The reason is, in practice, the MDGs are embedded within the broader context of the neoliberal restructuring of the global economy (trade and investment liberalization, privatization, deregulation) which has actually worsened many human development indicators in most regions. Unbridled market liberalization has weakened many governments’ capacity to ensure the progressive realization of human rights, and has undermined even the most modest development goals that are the MDGs.

As Charles Gore of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) acknowledged, “the MDGs have...been embedded within a particular approach to national policy which assumes that global integration, through the Washington Consensus policy package, together with good governance and more social spending, will lead to substantial poverty reduction and improved human development. But these policies have not been able to generate sufficient productive employment opportunities and livelihoods in poor countries, and they have been unable to build up those countries’ productive base and thus allow them to become less dependent on aid.”

The goal of strengthening global partnership for development is particularly important because it provides enabling or disabling conditions for meeting the other MDGs and advancing human development more generally. This is especially true for least developed countries with severely limited domestic resources (most of all in so-called fragile or failed states).

However, the same goal remains hobbled by the post-Washington consensus prescriptions that perpetuate the neoliberal framework championed by the World Bank and the IMF. Thus, while the Millennium Declaration resolves “…to create an environment at the national and global levels alike which is conducive to development and to the elimination of poverty,” it immediately follows this resolution with the statement that “We are committed to an open, equitable, rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory multilateral trading and financial system.”[5]

In practice, the MDGs are embedded within the broader context of the neoliberal restructuring of the global economy (trade and investment liberalization, privatization,
deregulation) which has actually worsened many human development indicators in most
regions.

Neoliberalism with a human face Yet another flaw in the MDG approach is its reduction of the goal and process of development to meeting specific, absolute, and measurable aspects of poverty. To Charles Gore, the ascendancy of the MDG approach as the lynchpin of the current international development consensus involves the ditching of the notion of development as a comprehensive process that entails evolution and structural transformation, in favor of development conceived as a collection of quantifiable performance standards.[6] Similarly, to Ashwani Saith, the MDGs confine tackling poverty to a simple equation: “external assistance + technological fixes + good local governance = poverty reduction.”[7]

The straitjacketed conception of development at the heart of the MDGs allows aspects so central to its achievement to be ignored. These include power relations, people’s rights, policy frameworks, and economic structures. Fixation with fulfilling targets distracts people from hard issues such as unequal North-South relations, unfair trade, debt and aid conditionalities, unfettered capital, the conduct of transnational corporations (TNCs), and widening inequalities problems that obtain from the prevailing neoliberal consensus. In the same vein, preoccupation with making “doable” projects that deliver recognizable results (like distributing mosquito nets) make such solutions as redistribution, universalizing access to social services, regulating TNCs, and democratizing global economic governance seem like unimportant asides. The MDG approach, as it were, sweeps all these matters under the rug, earning itself descriptions like “Washington Consensus with a human face,” or “neoliberalism’s deodorant.”[8]

Dysfunctional development outcomes It is not difficult to imagine countries scoring quick successes in meeting narrowly-defined development targets and indicators through ad-hoc measures. Conditional cash transfers in some Latin American countries are hailed for helping reduce rates of inequality and improving enrolment rates among children, absent redistributive reforms. The distribution of mosquito bed nets has made some improvements to reducing child mortality in Africa even as real improvements in the delivery of health services wait in the backburner.

These achievements are certainly noteworthy. But short of structural transformation and departing from conservative macroeconomic policy frameworks, it is hard to think how these quick wins might be sustained over the long term. Charles Gore, for instance, raises the issue of positive outcomes achieved through patchwork actions becoming dysfunctional, as when “more and more children go through school but public expenditure cannot sufficiently increase to hire extra teachers so the quality fails,” or when “they go through school but then cannot find jobs or productive livelihoods.”[9] One can also think of specific development targets being reached at the expense of others like lifting people out of income poverty, which, under the prevailing corporate-led globalization model, can only be achieved at great cost to labor rights, women’s rights, and the environment. Indeed, the eruption of economic, climate, and food crises in recent years suggests that without comprehensively addressing the power imbalances and wrongheaded policy choices at the root of poverty and underdevelopment, quick successes are bound to be eroded no sooner than they are won.

Looking forward
No doubt, the MDGs deserve some degree of praise. They have been useful in sparking public awareness on poverty and other key development concerns, and generating consensus around the goal of addressing them. Against the backdrop ofNo doubt, the MDGs deserve some degree of praise. They have been useful in sparking public awareness on poverty and other key development concerns, and generating consensus around the a planet with one billion people living in extreme poverty and one billion in hunger, one cannot but approve of the MDGs. To Saith, the MDGs have taken on the status of mother’s milk: “who on earth could be against it; not even multinationals… pushing canned powdered milk.”[10] But the MDGs’ strength their simplicity and broad appeal also make for their main weakness their obfuscation of the hard structural and policy issues at the core of poverty and underdevelopment.

As the MDG deadline draws closer, it is high time that we start discussing a post-2015 international
development agenda that goes deeper and beyond the MDGs. This new agenda should focus on development based on pursuing the realization of human rights, self-determination, people’s sovereignty over productive resources, democratic participation, equity, ecological sustainability, and social justice. This means moving away from neoliberal policy doctrines, and addressing structural imbalances in the way of their achievement, such as economic and political inequalities.

NOTES--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] The development goals in the Millennium Declaration are based
on an earlier goal-setting effort: the IMF- and World Bank-endorsed
International Development Goals (IDGs) of the OECD-DAC. In
the months following the Millennium Summit, a small group of
specialists from the UN, OECD, IMF, and World Bank worked
to merge the Declaration’s development goals with the IDGs.
According to David Hulme of the University of Manchester, the
UN managed to get the Bretton Woods institutions’ support for its
MDG effort by accepting IFI-overseen Poverty Reduction Strategy
Papers (PRSPs) as the main mechanism for developing country
governments to reach their anti-poverty goals. David Hulme, “The
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): A Short History of the
World’s Biggest Promise,” Brooks World Poverty Institute Working
Papers (2009): 38-39.

[2] UN General Assembly, 64th session, Keeping the promise: a
forward-looking review to promote an agreed agenda to achieve the
Millennium Development Goals by 2015: Report of the Secretary-
General (A/62/665), 12 February 2010 (Masthead).

[3] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Report on the
World Social Situation 2010: Rethinking Poverty (New York: United
Nations, 2009) (ST/ESA/324) (Sales No. E.09.IV.10), 15.

[4] International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook
Database, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/
weodata/index.aspx; accessed 30 May 2010. Simple average of the
per capita GDP (PPP) of the top and bottom 20 countries ranked
by per capita GDP (PPP) in the years 1990 and 2005. Data not
available for some countries in 1990.

[5] UN General Assembly, 55th session, Resolution adopted by
the General Assembly, United Nations Millennium Declaration (A/
RES/55/2), 18 September 2000 (Masthead), 4.

[6] Charles Gore, “The Global Development Cycle, MDGs and the
Future of Poverty Reduction,” http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/
MDG_2015_Publications/Gore_PAPER.pdf, 3.

[7] Ashwani Saith, “From Universal Values to Millennium
Development Goals: Lost in Translation,” Development and Change
37, no. 6 (2006): 1189.

[8] Charles Gore in the EADI/DSA/IDS/ActionAid/DFID
High Level Policy Forum “After 2015: Promoting Pro-Poor
Policy after the MDGs”; Antonio Tujan, Jr., “The Millennium
Development Goals: Reducing poverty or deodorizing neoliberal
globalization?”(Presentation at the IGNIS-Conference “Whose
Governance? Obstacles to the MDGs” at Mastemyr, Oslo, 21
September 2004) http://www.rorg.no/Artikler/717.html.

[9] Gore, 8.
[10] Saith: 1179.

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Written with reports from Ava Danlog, IBON/Reality of Aid country outreach officer for Asia-Pacific.