by Alex Evans | Apr 25, 2012 | Articles and Publications, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global Dashboard, Reports
Debate on what should follow the Millennium Development Goals after 2015 is now underway in earnest. This briefing paper by Alex Evans and David Steven, prepared for a closed session Brookings Institution meeting organised at the request of the US government, sets out an overview of the MDGs and their expected status in 2015; describes the background to, and options for, a post-2015 framework; and discusses the political challenges of agreeing a new framework and sets out considerations for governments and other stakeholders. (April 2012)
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by Alex Evans | Apr 17, 2012 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, Influence and networks
And now for the fun part of thinking about the UN’s forthcoming High Level Panel on the post-2015 agenda: who should feature on its membership?
As well as balancing the obvious country constituencies (low income / emerging / developed), the Panel will also need to balance experience with new faces (High Level Panels can easily succumb to the problem of ‘usual suspects’), and ensure a diversity of expertise that is not just drawn from the international development scene. Here are some ideas that David and I have come up with – comments, suggestions, rebuttals all very welcome. We’ll update the list to create a one-stop talent pool as we get ideas on GD comments, Twitter (reach us at @davidsteven and @alexevansuk) or on email.
Low income countries
Abdoulaye Wade (Senegal) and Amadou Toumani Touré (Mali) – two ex-heads of state from Africa who emerge with credit from the manner of their parting.
Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar) – obviously.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Nigeria) – will have a higher profile than ever following her World Bank bid, and would have a huge amount to contribute.
Meles Zenawi (Ethiopia) – strong record on both poverty reduction and climate change (though not on human rights). Co-chaired UN Panel on climate finance.
Emilia Peres (Timor Leste) – a competent finance minister and one of the prime movers behind the g7+. Would bring a consistent and coherent voice for fragile states. Alternatively, Francesca Bomboko (DRC) might be a good choice.
Shahnaz Wazir Ali (Pakistan) – a lonely advocate for education, health, and gender in a country that is a critical test case for the international community.
Emerging economies
Luis Alfonso de Alba (Mexico) – currently Mexico’s ambassador to the UN. Key figure in Cancun climate talks; first President of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006.
Jairam Ramesh (India) – currently minister for rural development; covered climate before that. Was a member of the Global Sustainability Panel.
Wen Jiabao (China) – recent events make it look distinctly unlikely that he’ll be a lame duck after his retirement. Has said he will attend Rio+20.
Lula Inacio Lula da Silva (Brazil) – given Brazil’s record on poverty reduction, a must-have if he proves to be available.
Trevor Manuel (South Africa) – currently Minister in the Presidency in charge of the National Planning Commission. A seasoned operator who knows the development agenda back to front.
Developed countries
Christian Friis Bach or Ida Auken (Denmark) – new development and environment ministers. Young, extremely smart, heavily engaged on the SDGs agenda.
Kitty van der Heijden (Nethlerlands) – current Ambassador for sustainable development. Key opinion former on the Rio+20 agenda and a formidable operator.
Hilde Johnson (Norway) – currently serving as SRSG on South Sudan. As Norway’s development minister, was of the founding members of the Utstein Group.
Hillary Clinton (US) – the Panel needs an American member, preferably from the government. While Raj Shah is the obvious choice, Hillary would be perfect – if she could be persuaded.
International system
Josette Sheeran (US) – former head of WFP, State Dept minister and G8 sous-sherpa before that. Now Vice Chair of World Economic Forum.
Angel Gurria (Mexico) – current Secretary-General of OECD. Membership would be a perfect link to the work of the OECD DAC (which was so central to the creation of the MDGs).
Min Zhu (China) – deputy Managing Director of the IMF. Smart, economically literate, and unusually forthcoming even on sensitive issues like resource scarcity.
Non-government and private sector
Melinda (or Bill) Gates (US) – will be a key opinion former on the post-2015 agenda, and has the potential to emerge as an influential champion of the Panel’s ideas.
Paul Polman (Netherlands) – as CEO of Unilever has made the company a serious player on sustainability; also highly effective as Chair of WEF group on food security.
Fazle Hasan Abed (Bangladesh) – as founder of BRAC, he has carved out new space at the intersection between civil society and social enterprise, with its business network funding 80% of its vast operation.
Amartya Sen (India) – the godfather of international development and co-creator of the UN’s Human Development Index.
Andrew Rugasira (Uganda) – chief executive of Good African Coffee; recently profiled admiringly in the New York Times.
Sergey Brin (Russia) – not just a cool name to have on the Panel, but also one who would be able to bring a distinctive – and essential – tech perspective.
Ricken Patel (Canada) – founder and CEO of Avaaz.org, a refreshing antidote to the old model of single issue NGOs. Would also tick the ‘youth’ box.
Update: The Beyond 2015 civil society coalition has put forward its own list of suggestions for civil society representatives here.
by Alex Evans | Apr 17, 2012 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global Dashboard, Global system, Influence and networks
While everyone’s assuming that the forthcoming UN High Level Panel on the post-2015 agenda will focus almost exclusively on the content of whatever is to replace the Millennium Development Goals after they expire in 2015, it’s worth pausing to remember that no-one’s seen the Panel’s terms of reference yet (indeed, it’s unlikely that they even exist in draft at this stage) – so the Panel’s remit might range considerably broader than that.
After all, the UN hasn’t done a major panel on development since 2005-6, when the High Level Panel on System-wide Coherence looked at how the UN could connect the dots better on development, humanitarian assistance and environment. (That Panel was set up Kofi Annan rather than Ban Ki-moon, moreover – and most people thought its recommendations, primarily on how to make the UN development system better joined-up within countries, were pretty limited.) So if the new Panel were to look at development more broadly, rather than just making recommendations on new Goals, what kind of Panel might it be?
I tend to think there are basically six models for a blue ribbon commission of this kind. Here’s a quick overview of them – lifted direct a note I did back in 2009, before the Global Sustainability Panel was launched (at pretty much the same stage, in fact, as the new post-2015 Panel is at now). The core question for any Panel, I argued, was: what is this Panel going to be remembered for? Here are the six options I set out – in roughly ascending order of ambition:
- An analytical Panel – like the Millennium Project. (This can’t be the whole story for a Panel on sustainability; and in any case the Millennium Project, the IPCC and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment have most of the ground covered between them. The one analytical thing the Panel could do is an integrated assessment of climate finance AND finance for development needs; we always stress that the former must be additional to the latter, but as we all know well, in fact they overlap hugely. So far we haven’t been able to talk about this for fear of undermining 0.7. But since 0.7’s now forty years old, and clearly doesn’t take account of climate, it may be time to update it.)
- A Panel that sets out a new narrative – like the Brundtland Commission. (Clearly needs to be part of the story – but not the whole story. The real challenge: is there anything new to say, given that the High Level Panel on Threats Challenges and Change covered the interdependence story pretty comprehensively? Part of the answer to that is clearly the post-2015 story on development, where we clearly have a lot to do to build in climate and also resilience more broadly.)
- A Panel that concentrates on moderate institutional reform – as the Panel on System Coherence did. (A more achievable option than 4-6 below, but risks making the UN appear obsessively introspective rather than tackling the issues themselves.)
- A Panel that tees up 4-6 political deals in particular areas – much as the Threats, Challenges and Change did on Responsibility to Protect, the new Peacebuilding Commission, reform of the Human Rights Council, and a formal Security Council definition of terrorism. (I think this looks like the best option at this stage, offering a balance of ambition and realism – but further work would be needed on mapping out the full range of options from which to select the 4-6 key areas. More on that below.)
- A Panel that sets out what a comprehensive approach would look like on one or two key issues (e.g. climate or food security – looking at all key dimensions of the issue, e.g. trade, finance, technology, institutions, on-the-ground development, etc. This is attractive in theory, but in practice risks either appearing to reinvent the wheel, or becoming bogged down in existing debates. It may be more ambitious than it seems at a glance.)
- A Panel that agrees a way forward on a key area of high disagreement – as Threats, Challenges and Change tried to on Security Council reform, before falling back to option 4 above. (Probably the leading candidate for such an approach would be the question of the level at which to stabilise greenhouse gases in the air, and how to share out the global emissions budget that would keep us below it: while the Panel couldn’t quantify what the ceiling or the allocation should be, it could conceivably set out how those questions will be settled – as the UNFCCC process has failed to, over the last 20 years. Hard to discern the political conditions for anything approaching this level of ambition, especially post-Copenhagen. But political space on climate has always been driven by surprise events – e.g. the fact that Jim Hansen’s Senate testimony in 1988 was in the middle of a freak heatwave – so may be worth having a very high ambition option ‘on the shelf’, that could be offered to the co-chairs if the conditions arise.)
Of course, the list I wrote in 2009 is more focused on environment, and less on development, than the post-2015 Panel would need to be. But the basic headings still represent the choices that the new Panel’s chairs and members will face as they sit down for their first meeting and figure out what they’re going to try to do together.
As you’ll have realised if you read my post yesterday on the kinds of goals the Panel could recommend, or David’s post last week on what will make for an effective set of goals, one thing we both feel strongly about is that this Panel needs to think through its approach in a structured way – not fall into the trap of plunging straight into the detail without a plan for what the Panel’s trying to achieve, what its approach will be, what kind of evidence base it needs to assemble and what it wants to be remembered for.
by Alex Evans | Apr 16, 2012 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global Dashboard, Global system, Influence and networks
Following the British government’s announcement that David Cameron will be one of the co-chairs of the UN’s forthcoming High Level Panel on what should follow the Millennium Development Goals after they expire in 2015, we’ve been setting out some thoughts about the design principles of any new set of goals. Last week, David set out some of the criteria that will make for an effective set of goals. So what about the actual content of the goals?
Amid widespread enthusiasm for the new idea of Sustainable Development Goals (see this briefing), there’s a marked lack of clarity about what such goals would actually look like: what they’d cover, how they’d work, how they’d relate to the existing MDGs and so on. Some people want to see environmental considerations like planetary boundaries in the new framework. Others want to see enabling conditions for development, like growth or governance. Lots of people are talking about access to energy as an area where a new goal could be agreed. Lots of others would love to see a new goal on reducing inequality.
Before the SDGs debate goes much further, these kinds of debate need to become a lot more structured if we’re to avoid getting a ‘Christmas tree’ of goals (weighed down with everyone’s baubles, lacking focus or any sense of priorities). So what are the key questions we need answers to, and in what order should we be asking them? Here’s our take on the five core questions that will shape the post-2015 agenda:
- Do we need new goals at all? Not enough people have stopped to ask whether new goals are really needed in the first place. But it’s essential that the approach to post-2015 be thought through from first principles: the case for new goals won’t be persuasive unless it sets out clearly why it is that quantified targets are likely to be an effective tool to accelerate development or increase sustainability, especially given that evidence for the impact of the existing MDGs isn’t conclusive.
- Should goals be universal? The current MDGs are designed to apply to the world’s most vulnerable people – in other words, about a billion of them if you use $1.25 a day of income as the benchmark, or 2 billion at $2 a day. Should a new set of goals continue with this basic principle? Or should it take a radically different approach, and aim for goals that would be genuinely global in coverage – in other words applying to 7 billion rather than 1 billion people?
- How broad should goals be? New goals after 2015 could be tightly defined (a small set of headline targets in a few specific sectors, say), fully comprehensive (covering all aspects of society, economy, and the environment), or somewhere in between (like the current MDGs, which cover a representative set of issues).
- Do we need one, or more than one, framework? While an all-singing, all-dancing package of SDGs would logically subsume MDGs, it’s also possible to imagine slimmed down SDGs living alongside revised MDGs (‘twin tracks’), or a variety of hybrid models (a loose ‘family’ of goals, that could apply just to poor countries or be universal in nature).
- Should the framework be binding? The MDGs were designed to be global targets – not to apply to individual countries. While many donors have increasingly tracked MDG progress at country level (and some countries have incorporated them into law or in some cases even the constitution), it’s also the case that the MDGs probably couldn’t have been agreed if they had imposed binding obligations on governments. So should future goals be applied at national as well as global level? And should they define rights or desired outcomes?
Depending on how you answer these questions, you end up at one of a range of different kinds of outcome:
Full SDGs – universal, comprehensive, covering all 7 billion of us and with nationally specific targets – have some momentum right now. But it’s hard to see major powers signing up: India’s against, China’s keeping quiet for now, and it’s hard to see the US agreeing to anything that looks like global direction of the US’s domestic agenda. Don’t hold your breath.
SDGs-lite – which is where we might end up if the full SDGs agenda gets progressively diluted (e.g. controversial goals get dropped; targets become aspirational or voluntary and fail to be matched with a hard-edged delivery plan). This option runs the risk of failing to satisfy anyone (governments, campaigners, the media) – while also losing the MDGs’ focus on the poorest.
MDGs Plus – This option would start from the core MDG principle of focusing on the poorest, but built outwards from there. The risk is that reopening the framework could lead to a ‘Christmas tree’ outcome. But strong leadership could also keep the agenda tight – perhaps complementing goals with a set of key capabilities open to peer review.
Hybrids – Another option would be to combine SDGs and MDGs in a hybrid – for example, the approach proposed by Oxfam’s Kate Raworth. This approach would allow an evolutionary approach under which the poverty elements of the goals would be agreed early on in the process – thus safeguarding the MDGs’ poverty focus before moving on to the politically more challenging ground of sustainability goals.
Car crash – Finally, of course, it could all go pear-shaped. This is a risk that deserves to be taken very seriously indeed; after all, it’s not as though the last few years are short of example of sustainability and climate summits going wrong in one way or another. Remember: the MDGs took ten years to emerge, during a period of history that was a lot more warm and fuzzy than today’s context – and the MDGs were politically much easier than goals on politically charged areas like sustainable consumption. A car crash scenario could lead to the loss of the MDGs’ poverty focus with no countervailing win in another area.
(This post is based on a forthcoming Brookings paper by David and I on the post-2015 challenge, which will be published in the next few days.)
by David Steven | Apr 12, 2012 | Economics and development, Influence and networks, UK
As David Cameron prepares to chair the High Level Panel charged with designing a successor to the Millennium Development Goals, he should be in no doubt that he faces a tough job.
The original goals have been remarkably successful. Even in a single organisation, most targets are agreed and then quickly forgotten. The MDGs, which took a decade to stitch together, have prospered since their final agreement in 2002. Most developing country governments, and nearly all donors, have at least partially aligned policies to them.
Poverty rates have also dropped remarkably quickly (and not just in China) and progress towards social development targets seems now to be accelerating. How much of the good news can be directly attributed to the MDGs is hard to prove. But if you accept that goals can only ever be a part of the answer to a complex problem, then the British PM should start by asking why the MDGs did so well, not by assuming that his Panel is easily going to come up with something better.
His first question should be to ask what makes for an effective set of goals. I’d identify five criteria. They should:
- Be resonant – powerful, simple and clear enough to communicate with politicians, media, public.
- Form the main elements of a common strategic language, enabling different types of organisation to understand and work with each other.
- Be amenable to implementation, not just on a technical level, but given likely political and resource constraints.
- Have sufficient authority and clarity that it matters whether or not they are delivered fifteen years down the road.
Conversely, effective goals avoid:
- Too much complexity – every interest group in the world will want ‘its’ target included and for technocrats more is usually more. Resisting a ‘Christmas Tree’ framework will require a willingness to pick tough political battles.
- Straying into areas where consensus doesn’t exist – goals make countries more likely to do difficult things they believe are in their best interests; they can’t be used radically to change their identification of those interests.
- Distorting incentives in a way that is significantly counterproductive. Goals will inevitably have at least some adverse consequences, but the detail and balance of the framework will determine how serious a problem this is, as will the quality of the data on results (to avoid cheating).
- Making promises that aren’t really meant – some countries will be happy to sign up to goals they have no intention of doing anything to meet and it is possible to imagine leaders embracing a set of empty promises in 2015 just so they can have a big announcement to make.
So my advice to David Cameron would be to take three types of failure very seriously:
- A failure to agree – lots of talk that leads, ultimately, to another multilateral car crash.
- A framework to forget – we get agreement in 2015, but it’s largely ignored thereafter.
- A strategic realignment to no great purpose – we get goals, try to implement them, but it doesn’t work out due to a lack of will or because the goals are the wrong ones.
None of this is to say that I think that, as Chair of the Panel, the PM has been handed (or worse, lobbied for) a poisoned chalice. Sequels are usually worse than the original, precisely because of the complacent assumption that the original’s success will easily be replicated. Cameron – and his team – need to make it clear from the beginning that they are intent on avoiding this error.
(This post is based on a talk I gave to a seminar recently at Brookings. Alex and I will publish a Brookings paper on the post-2015 challenge in the next few days.)
