International Development CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Daniel Seymour, Deputy Director, Programme Division, UN Women

Main Points

1. The main lessons to be learned from the experience of a development agenda framed around the MDGs are:

Targets have value in providing focus to development efforts.

Goals and targets such as the MDGs can have considerable traction as a high-level advocacy tool: there is some truth in the claim that the MDGs helped temper the harsher implications of the “Washington Consensus”.

Goals and targets established without a process of consultation and engagement will enjoy limited ownership and commitment from a broad range of stakeholders.

Goals and targets that do not have clear accountabilities associated with them, specifying who must do what, will have limited traction as there will be limited consequences for failing to meet them. For example, in 2015 it will not be possible to say specifically which actors were responsible for areas of success or failure.

Goals and targets that specify targets at an aggregate level will not be effective in supporting efforts to reduce inequality, and might even hamper such efforts where progress on the aggregate obscures failures to improve the situation of the poorest (as has been argued by indigenous groups for example). Inequality has increased over the lifespan of the MDGs by various measures. It is the least well off who appear to have benefitted least in many countries over the last two decades of development.

2. One of the main challenges in designing a post-2015 development agenda will be reconciling not only competing interests, but also competing perspectives on development, most notably:

That development is a primarily technical process where the key approach is to find proven, cost-effective solutions and to take them to scale.

That development is a primarily political process, where the drivers of development are political commitment to change, including changes which may not be to the exclusive benefit of elites.

That any development agenda should be universal and promote progress in all countries.

That development as a concept does not adequately capture sustainability and environmental concerns, and that the basis for discussion must be broadened.

3. The argument that development is driven by technical advances, and that technical support is the most valuable external input to development, is becoming less tenable intellectually and in terms of the evidence available. Instead, development is a primarily political phenomenon. A new development agenda needs to recognize this reality, and accordingly frame development objectives in terms of systemic and transformative changes that deliver results, with corresponding goals and targets related to those changes. Progress towards targets such as those of the MDGs may be due to many factors, of which the efforts of development partners will be only one. By focusing on what happened rather than what was done, this type of target is limited in terms of promoting policy change.

4. There are three main elements of an agenda which would deliver such systemic and transformative change:

(i)Achieving broader ownership: A widely owned agenda is more likely to achieve political traction, and thereby drive political change. This means ensuring that the post-2015 agenda is considered by the widest possible group of stakeholders to be emerged from a process that they had access to. The main risk to be avoided is a consultative process which is then ignored once negotiation between different groupings of Member States at the UN begins. This could have the opposite effect of entrenching a degree of antipathy towards an agenda which is considered by civil society in particular to have been conceived not only without them, but to have actively ignored their concerns.

(ii)Clear and measurable accountabilities: Targets such as achieving 0.7% of GNI for ODA support accountability, in that it is relatively easy to tell who has done it and who has not. Targets such as halving poverty lack this quality. Accountability targets can reflect certain systemic aspects which we believe reflect a basic level of governmental commitment to the human rights of their citizens. These might include targets that require some type of social protection system, targets around minimum legislative standards on violence against women, or targets that require a certain proportion of government expenditure for basic social services.

(iii)Elements which address inequality: While some degree of inequality is a normal aspect of any country context, the extreme levels of inequality seen in many countries reflect the extent to which the poorest are failed by the systems and structures of those countries. Inequality-sensitive targets can be formulated in many ways, such as targets to reduce the gap in outcomes between top and bottom income quintiles (eg reducing the difference in under-5 mortality between the top and bottom quintiles), targets that seek to reduce the standard deviation from a key development indicator, targets that focus poverty depth or gap rather than poverty headcount (that is, reducing how poor the poor are, rather than just the number of poor), or setting targets which must be met by all regions in a country.

Background to my Submission

I have a formal training in political science, economics and human rights law. My career in development has included work in Save the Children UK and International, with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as an advisor on children’s rights, in Kosovo with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe on institutional development, and with the United Nations in UNICEF and now UN Women, including a posting in Viet Nam. I have written and spoken on the MDGs and the post-2015 agenda for a number of years.

Factual Information

On inequality: UNICEF’s Progress for Children (2010) states that in 18 of 26 developing countries with a decline in under-five mortality of 10% or more, the gap in under-five mortality between the richest and poorest households either widened or stayed the same—and in 10 of these countries, inequality increased by 10% or more.

On accountability: The Economist, 23 September 2010: “A global halving [of poverty] by 2015 seems well within reach. Yet this ‘victory’ is mainly due to a drop in China’s poverty rate from 60% in 1990 to 16% in 2005. Because China and India accounted for over 62% of the planet’s poor in 1990, changes to the world’s poverty rate depend heavily on their performance. A global goal is therefore a poor way to give the governments of smaller countries an incentive to tackle poverty”.

Suggested Recommendations

Any new development agenda should include the following mutually supportive elements:

Retain the strengths of a target based approach: Targets have considerable value in establishing an agenda. However, that strength needs to be applied to systemic and transformative objectives, such as targets for levels of budget allocation to social objectives, for minimum legislative standards, or for policies relating to social protection minima. For example, targets such as that all countries have free and compulsory primary and secondary education, universal healthcare provision, universal child benefit or free access to legal services all aim at systemic change. Targets such as percentage of children attending school, or those that measure health outcomes are less well-suited to driving systemic change.

Provide clear accountabilities for the full range of development partners: Development actors, including governments, have little incentive to be responsive to an agenda for which accountabilities are unclear. An influential agenda will be designed so that the accountabilities for the various elements within it are clear and measurable, and will ideally stipulate the monitoring system by which such accountabilities would be tracked.

Engage and provide a role for citizens of both the developed and developing world: The post-2015 development agenda should be derived from a consultative process that maximises the ownership and buy-in of the broadest possible range of stakeholders. However, the pursuit of this objective should be coupled with efforts to ensure that the outputs of any consultation do not become essentially ignored in final negotiations between Member States, something which could prove counter-productive.

Explicitly address the distributional nature of development results and issues of inequality: There are different ways in which concerns about inequality might be incorporated into a development agenda. These include approaches which focus on the most marginalised and excluded, approaches which seek to reduce the gaps between the richest and poorest, and approaches which seek to reduce gaps between geographical areas in countries or between countries. The primary issue is to find the most politically viable of these.

2 October 2012