The 2010 Millennium Development Goals Review Summit

Written evidence submitted by International Alert

Replacing the MDGs with a better framework

7th October, 2010

Background

1. An important outcome of the MDG Review Summit in September 2010 was the decision to define a new framework within which the international community can plan and measure development progress, post-2015. The UK is a leader in the development sector, and is widely listened to on development issues. Indeed, its leadership role in international development has become one of the factors which define the UK’s role and status in a changing world. It is therefore important for HMG and the British development sector more broadly to be in the forefront of thinking about the right framework to replace the MDGs after 2015.

2. International Alert is a British NGO, building peace in over 20 countries since 1985, and conducting policy advocacy with governments, intergovernmental organisations and businesses, based on lessons we have learned through our work in the field. In the past we have successfully argued for peacebuilding to be adopted as an integral element of overseas development assistance (ODA) policy and strategies. Much of our advocacy is now focused on helping ODA institutions to implement peacebuilding effectively. This is a short submission, responding to the Committee’s expressed interest in looking ahead to after the MDG deadline of 2015, and we would welcome the chance to provide more detail in oral testimony to the Committee.

3. In the run-up to the MDG Summit we published a report (Working with the Grain to Change the Grain: Moving Beyond the MDGs) [1] , outlining the inadequacy of the MDGs as a mechanism for setting and measuring targets for ODA, and proposing an improved model. The problem with the MDGs is that they are:

· Too narrow, missing many of the critical elements of development, such as governance, human rights and security.

· Too technical, missing the political and societal change which is at the heart of human progress, and failing to provide a theory of change which withstands rigorous scrutiny.

· Top-down, setting global goals and targets, when development happens locally.

4. As such, the MDGs have been acting as perverse incentives, limiting and at times preventing a holistic, societal, political and locally-owned approach to ODA. This is particularly important in conflict-affected or fragile contexts, where even the most well-meaning ODA programmes can do as much harm as good, especially if they are not tailored to the local political context. It is widely accepted that it is in such contexts that development assistance is most needed, and has had the least impact so far, indicating that a new approach is needed.

5. Ironically, given the apolitical nature of the MDGs, one of the reasons for their inherent weakness is in fact political. While the MDGs are often treated as though they represent an intellectual foundation for development policy and practice, they are in fact the flawed product of a political compromise, in which the UN sought to identify a set of development indicators to which over 150 diverse governments could sign up. Inevitably, this resulted in a set of depoliticised goals and a weakened framework which guided policy makers and practitioners in the direction of politically palatable themes and targets, and away from an objective and forensic analytical search for the best ways to achieve sustainable impact. Curiously, the Millennium Declaration, agreed to in 2000 at the UN, was much more far-reaching, and set out a much broader vision which is largely ignored and ill-served by the MDGs. For example in addition to poverty reduction it embraced governance, peace, security, and human rights.

6. The MDGs are a symptom of problems which undermine the ODA sector and its institutions more generally. The search for international agreement between widely differing political perspectives, while important, has begun to stand in the way of clear and critical thinking about how people make progress – i.e. how development happens. The development discourse has been bowdlerised; lacking in any ideological component, for fear of provoking disagreement. This leads to ill-thought through development policies and practices, which therefore fail the people they are designed to help.

7. As an illustration of ways in which the MDG framework pulls agencies in the wrong direction, the OECD-DAC’s peer review of UK ODA earlier this year chided DFID for drifting too far from the MDGs.

A process to replace the MDGs, post-2015

8. Discussions about the post-2015 framework should start from a basis of clear and logical thinking, rather than taking the already compromised MDGs as their starting point. We need to go back to basics and ask what we really mean by development, and look at how development has happened in the past, to learn how it might happen in the future and therefore what the institutions of ODA, including DFID and other UK agencies, and the multilaterals the UK supports, should be aiming to achieve, and how.

9. This means that the discussion process should include a diverse set of perspectives, including not only development sector specialists from rich and poor countries, and members of civil society from diverse developing country environments, economists and technical specialists, but also politicians, the media, historians, anthropologists, and others. While this is clearly a global discussion, it makes sense for the UK to hold its own discussion at an early stage in the process, using the political and civil society mechanisms at our disposal, to determine if there is a "UK position" which we can contribute to the broader global debate. While a UK position as such may be unobtainable or even ultimately unnecessary, we believe this process would highlight the liberal and democratic values inherent in the UK, and that these values are critical to the global debate and to the framework itself. Many of the ideas contained in DFID’s 2009 White Paper, in subsequent DFID policy papers on Statebuilding and Peacebuilding and in the International Development Secretary’s recent speech to the Royal College of Defence Studies have a major contribution to make, especially concerning the need to engage more politically to support development in fragile contexts. As parliamentarians the Select Committee has an important role to play.

10. The task is no less than to reframe the development discourse and within this to establish a redefined development narrative and a new global framework to replace the MDGs when they expire in 2015. This will tell the story of how human societies have developed, are developing and can develop further in the future. To avoid repeating the problems associated with the MDGs, it is important that this narrative achieves a better balance between political expediency and analytical rigour than was the case with the MDGs. The first step must be to create an analytically rigorous model. Once this is established, it can be used as the basis for a more political framework, but there should be no confusion between the two. This new framework can then be used by governments, NGOs, intergovernmental bodies and others, in line with the OECD’s exhortation to take the context as the starting point, to inspire local, national, regional and where appropriate, global goals and measures of progress.

A new framework for development

11. In our recent report cited above, we suggested a model or framework for this new narrative, based on a vision of a world in which people can resolve their differences without violence, while continuing to make equitable social and economic progress, and without lessening the opportunities for their neighbours or future generations to do the same. This vision would be both enabled and recognisable by five core factors (as shown in the right-hand column in the figure below), underpinned by a self-reinforcing set of values and institutions; and we suggest how societies have in the past made the transition towards this vision, giving clues as to how others may do so, and how such processes can be catalysed and helped (shown in the left-hand column of the diagram below). It is notable that, while the MDGs do fit within this model, they make up a very small part of it. This is not surprising: if one were asked to write a history of the development of the UK for example, it is not likely that one would choose to write it solely in terms of the MDGs.

12. We make no claim that our model is perfectly fit for purpose. Indeed, it is important not to make too strong a claim for a single all-encompassing development model, lest the problems of the MDGs repeat themselves. More, honest debate is what is needed and there must be room for diverse, even contradictory perspectives. But it is important to create a common framework within which different perspectives can be compared, and which can be used to inspire progress and hold development actors accountable for their actions and progress. Learning from the errors of the MDGs, we recommend that this common framework should have certain minimum characteristics, i.e. that it should:

· Be vision-based, i.e. contain a comprehensive idea of what developed societies look like, so that ODA programmes and policies can be judged on their contribution towards this vision.

· Describe how societies have transformed and can transform – i.e., make progress towards the vision.

· Explain the role of values and institutions in the process of change and in the vision itself.

· Be analytically sound.

· Have room for ideology – ideas about how and why changes happen – to help judge whether the process and outcomes of change are good ones or not.

· Be true to the idea of enabling change as contained in the Millennium Declaration: i.e., ‘promote and create global and national environments conducive to development and to the eradication of poverty, and make sufficient resources available’. This is in recognition that development is a mainly endogenous process of change happening at multiple inter-related levels within society, requiring leadership and effective relationships and negotiation; and one that can be influenced, but not wrought, by external forces and an external enabling environment.

· Acknowledge the fundamental importance of subsidiarity, i.e. that decisions and actions are taken at the lowest appropriate level, within a framework which is set at the highest appropriate level; i.e. be expected to take context as the starting point, as recommended by the OECD-DAC.

· Make clear the difference between the vision, and the means or strategies needed to get there. This means, for example, disentangling humanitarian from development outcomes and processes – i.e. make clear the difference between humanitarian outcomes such as providing basic services to people in fragile contexts, and true development milestones that are the markers of progress towards the vision.

· Recognise the complexities and nuanced nature of development, and find ways to communicate these publicly as simply as possible.

13. This new framework needs to be substantially completed by 2014, in time for the establishment of a new guiding framework to replace the MDGs.