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Jim Michel* recalls the moment when the world agreed to create common development goals after a decade of declining aid budgets, and he calls on the OECD to continue to take the lead in aid effectiveness…
The Millennium Development Goals serve a valuable purpose. They represent a vision of concrete, measurable achievement – not mere aspirations of what might be, but an informed judgment of what can be. If attainment of these goals over the next decade is possible, then we all have strong reasons – reasons of both self-interest and moral imperative – to make the necessary effort.
But the global consensus about the MDGs has also contributed to a growing concern that for many vulnerable people around the globe the promise of the Goals will not be fulfilled. This is giving rise to a sense of urgency, an insistence that it is time to move beyond consensus and accelerate the pace of action.
Attention is now focused on the imminent 2005 World Summit, a high-level plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly that will review progress and consider the further efforts needed to achieve the MDGs. Hopes are high that the international community will move beyond consensus to action, and that resolve to achieve the Goals will gain renewed momentum in New York. These hopes are accompanied by fears that other priorities on the international agenda will distract us from this important work.
As we await the outcome of the “Millennium +5” Summit, I find considerable encouragement from thinking about how the history of the Millennium Development Goals has evolved along a logical path that has responded more to our hopes than to our fears.
I am pleased to share this personal account with readers of the DAC News.
When I arrived in Paris in February 1994 to assume my duties as DAC Chair, the volume of official development assistance had begun a decline that was to continue until 1997. A recurrent theme of DAC deliberations that year was the relationship between aid volume and perceptions of aid effectiveness in both donor and partner countries. There emerged a consensus that the DAC should disseminate a brief statement, based on available evidence, to the effect that development was a worthy and attainable goal, that strategies for success were known, and that efficiently administered development assistance, within a coherent policy framework, was a vital component of success. This initiative was seen as a “mid-decade update” of a policy statement that the DAC had issued in 1989.
An active collaboration between the DAC Secretariat and delegates of member states produced a concise text that we entitled “Development Partnerships in the New Global Context.” This statement identified poverty reduction as the central challenge and endorsed a comprehensive strategy that integrated elements of sound economic policies; social investment; participation and gender equality; good governance, human rights and the rule of law; sustainable environmental practices; and conflict prevention. It expressed a commitment by DAC members to support the partnership approach.
At their annual High Level Meeting in May 1995, Development Ministers and Heads of Aid Agencies adopted this statement of shared orientations for their development cooperation efforts.
The High Level Meeting also produced a surprise, at least for the Chair. Not content with their decision to approve a new policy statement on development partnerships, the high level officials decided that the DAC should also undertake a more profound reflection on “strategies looking to the next century.” They directed that this process should be open to all DAC members, and declared that they, the Ministers and Agency Heads, would be directly and personally involved.
This extraordinary set of decisions significantly raised the shared expectation of what the DAC should aspire to.
It set the stage for a challenging and stimulating year of dialogue among senior policymakers, intense research and broad consultation. The product of this work was a set of concrete, medium-term goals, all based on the recommendations of major United Nations conferences, to be pursued on the basis of agreed principles: people-centred development, local ownership, global integration and international partnership. All of this was presented in the report Shaping the 21st Century, which was approved by the DAC High Level Meeting in May 1996.
The bold undertaking launched by the DAC in 1995 had produced a development strategy that was remarkably well received. Both the principles of partnership and the specific suggested goals met with a positive response from throughout the international community. The DAC presented the report as an invitation to dialogue, not as an OECD prescription for the world. The dialogue that followed was broad and deep, and the degree of consensus that it revealed was impressive. Particularly gratifying were the insights gained in a series of partnership forums with representatives of developing countries, beginning in 1997.
Ultimately, the consensus was sufficiently strong to permit the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Secretary-General of the OECD, the Managing Director of the IMF, and the President of the World Bank, to join in publishing a report on the eve of the Millennium Summit, A Better World for All. In the preface, the leaders of the sponsoring organisations described the goals as “a common framework to guide our policies and programmes and to assess our effectiveness.”
In September 2000, heads of state and government adopted the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals, based largely on the formulation recommended in Shaping the 21st Century and A Better World for All. The Goals thus evolved from being disparate findings in various United Nations conferences to becoming a unified set of DAC recommendations to the international community, and then to acquiring recognition as a universally agreed vision to guide international co-operation.
Whatever is said about the MDGs at the 2005 World Summit, concern about converting consensus into timely action will remain, and for good reason. The latest Global Monitoring Report demonstrates that if present trends continue most of the MDGs will not be met by 2015. Yet, concerted action is the next logical step in the journey that produced such a broad consensus about what the goals should be.
The first point of the five-point agenda recommended in the 2005 Global Monitoring Report by the World Bank and IMF is to “anchor efforts to achieve MDGs in country-led development strategies and harmonise assistance on the basis of these strategies.” But the reality is that some developing countries have been unable to put in place and carry out effective locally owned strategies and some donors have been unable to adapt their programmes so that they will encourage and support local capacity and ownership. In March 2005, ministers of developed and developing countries and heads of multilateral and bilateral development agencies addressed this reality at the Paris High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, where they resolved “to take far-reaching and monitorable actions to reform the ways we deliver and managed aid.”
The DAC, which ten years ago took the first steps towards today’s consensus on the Millennium Development Goals, is now in a position to take a further initiative aimed at achieving the vision that the goals represent.
The DAC’s leadership role in the follow up to the Paris High Level Forum provides an opportunity to make mutual accountability for locally led strategies the norm rather than the exception. The development ministers and heads of aid agencies who boldly launched the MDGs in 1995 and 1996 produced a consensus that has made an important contribution. In 2005 and 2006, their successors can make an equally bold and even more important contribution by making a sustained and coordinated personal commitment to convert the consensus into effective action towards a more stable, safe and just global society.
*James Michel is Senior Counsel, DPK Consulting, and an independent consultant in international development cooperation. From 1994 until 1999 he served as Chair of the DAC.
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