The Millennium Development Goals: A missed opportunity?
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Upfront
The Millennium Development Goals: A missed opportunity?
WENDY HARCOURT
Nowadays within the United Nations system, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (see box) are mentioned everywhere you turn. Outside the system, they are discussed far less, and surveys indicate that they are not widely known and if known most people are cynical rather than appreciative. Some see them as simply hijacking space and pulling in good people, particularly eloquent speakers from the South, into yet another UN project. Somewhat more puzzling however, is that even senior UN staff call them publicly the minimum development goals and almost all commentators, including those responsible for making them happen, see them as likely to fail. Is there, one wonders, something wrong with the ‘messaging’? What are some of the reasons for this anticipated ‘failure’ when we are just a few years into the process and have another decade to go? The first observation is that the goals themselves are not so lofty or impossible or new. And so, one has to conclude that despite all the technical talk about strategies, indicators and measurement and the estimates of funds required, all presented in an impressive array of tables and reports, essentially the MDG process is a political one ^ both within the UN and outside. It seems that Kofi Annan is taking the occasion to call the house to order in order to sharpen the perceived success rates of the UN. As the organization is ever more under public scrutiny, he has to show it works even in relation to the failures of governments to keep promises. He needs to weather the general mood swings to private^public partnerships, ‘corporate responsibility’, a tightening of state funds and a strong ‘conference fatigue’. Big UN events and promises, so the story goes, waste a lot of money and do nothing to end poverty or prevent HIV/AIDS or limit environmental degradation or halt the widening gap between the rich and the poor. In short, in an era of neo-conservatism the UN is struggling to survive attacks from all sides. No doubt even more since the US election in November 2004 and a second round for an administration that sees itself with the mandate to pursue unilateralism and to dominate the global scene, secure in its military and economic might. Certainly, it seems set to undermine even further multilateral agreements on international justice, the environment and women’s reproductive health and rights. Development (2005) 48(1), 1–4. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100117
Development 48(1): Upfront
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The MDGs seem somewhat tame in this picture. They do, however, represent a strong push from Annan to pull the UN system behind a‘do-able’set of goals agreed to by Heads of State at the Millennium Summit in 2000 and Monterrey in 2002 and put in place by all the Governments who signed. This global process will be steered by expert advice to the UN secretary general (led by Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University) and flanked by a UNDP run campaign to reach civil society and parliamentarians and a national mon
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