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The Power of Numbers: A Critical Review of Millennium Development Goal Targets for Human Development and Human Rights
SAKIKO FUKUDA-PARR*, ALICIA ELY YAMIN** & JOSHUA GREENSTEIN***
*Graduate Program in International Affairs, The New School, New York, USA
**Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
***Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research, New York, USA
ABSTRACT The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were heralded as opening a new chapter in international development, and have led to the use of global goals and target-setting as a central instrument defining the international development agenda. Despite this increased importance, little is understood about how they influence policy priorities of key stakeholders, and their broader consequences. While quantification is the key strength of global goals, it also involves simplification, reification and abstraction, which have far-reaching implications for redefining priorities. This paper highlights the key findings and conclusions of the Power of Numbers Project, which undertook 11 case studies of the effects of selected MDG goals/targets, including both the empirical effects on policy priorities and normative effects on development discourses, and drew specifically on human rights principles and human development priorities. While the Project found that the effects varied considerably from one goal/target to another, all led to unintended consequences in diverting attention from other important objectives and reshaping development thinking. Many of the indicators were poorly selected and contributed to distorting effects. The Project concludes that target-setting is a valuable but a limited and blunt tool, and that the methodology for target-setting should be refined to include policy responsiveness in addition to data availability criteria.
Introduction
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were heralded as opening a new chapter in international development. They have been described as āthe most broadly supported, comprehensive and specific poverty reduction targets the world has ever establishedā (UN Millenium Project 2005 2011) and are widely credited with having mobilized and maintained support for global poverty reduction (Waage et al. 2010). The enthusiasm over these successes of the MDGs appears to have entrenched goal-setting as a central policy instrument of global governance for development. Despite this newfound prominence, and the virtually universal acceptance of the value of global goal-setting, the ways in which global goals achieve their influence in shaping priorities and actions of the key stakeholders, and the ensuing consequences, are not well understood.
The critical debates and literature on the MDGs have focused on whether the 2015 targets are likely to be met, and on a critique of their composition, methodology for target-setting, and negotiating process.1 However, the MDGs as a consensus development agenda have had wide-reaching influence on both policy priorities and on development thought. The intended policy objective of the MDGs was to draw attention to important but neglected social priorities. But they have taken on the broader role of defining a development strategy. Used in this way, target-setting can also unintentionally distort priorities by displacing attention from other objectives, disrupting ongoing initiatives and alliances, creating perverse incentives, and undermining alternative policy analyses.
This special issue includes 11 case studies of MDG goals/targets and their effects on development agendas, including both empirical effects on policy priorities and normative effects on development thinking. In particular, we evaluated whether these effects furthered the vision of the Millennium Declaration for development that is people centered,2 drawing specifically on human rights principles and human development priorities.
Global goals exercise the āPower of Numbersā because of the potentially distorting effects of numerical indicators in redefining concepts that they are intended to measure (Poovey 1998; Porter 1994). The core strength of the MDGs is that they express important social objectives in the form of concrete outcomes that can be measured. However, translating social phenomena into measurable outcomes involves a transformation that reifies intangible phenomena, simplifies complex concepts, and abstracts social change from local contexts. The MDGs presented a short list of measurable outcomes communicating the urgent ethical norm of ending poverty, yet in the process they may have transformed the meaning of that objective, and in turn affected how particular solutions were identified. The MDGs also created incentives by numeric target-setting, which were used to set standards and facilitate monitoring. But what were the empirical consequences of these incentives on policy priorities reflected, for example, in resource allocations of governments and donors? The studies in this issue explore how the very strengths of the MDGsāsimplicity, measurability and concretenessāalso proved to be the sources of distortion.
A better understanding of the incentives that global goals create and their intended and unintended effects is essential in order to sharpen the methodology for setting targets and selecting indicators. While goals may be defined on normative groundsāreflecting consensus on important political objectives for the global societyāsetting quantitative targets and selecting indicators is necessarily guided by technocratic criteria. Without an understanding of the effects of goals, global goal-setting will proceed in the dark, and the possibilities for achieving transformative change through development will be drastically undermined.
This introduction highlights some key findings and conclusions from the Power of Numbers Project and draws lessons for criteria that should guide target-setting and indicator selection in the post-2015 agenda-setting and Sustainable Development Goal-setting processes that are now underway.
Conceptual Framework
Analytical Framework: The Power of Numbers
The concept paper in this collection by Fukuda-Parr explains how the core power of goals, such as the MDGs, is derived from the exercise of numerical target-setting and the selection of measurement indicators. The Project draws on the conceptual model developed in the recent Sociology of Knowledge literature, particularly on āindicators as a technology of governanceā that models the effects of indicators.3 According to this model, indicators exert influence in two ways: by setting performance standards against which progress can be monitored, rewarded or penalized; and by creating a āknowledge effectā where the indicators intended to reflect a concept effectively redefine it. Performance standards create incentives for behavior change on the part of policy-makers, opinion-makers, civil society groups, businesses and the public. Knowledge effects can redefine the purpose of development, the key constraints and the means to address them.
In an effort to explore how the MDGs created incentives for behavior (policy) change and knowledge (ideas) change, this Project undertook 11 case studies, each focused on a specific goal or target. Each study examined:
ā¢ the analytical and normative origins of each goal/target;
ā¢ the political economy of setting the specific goal and targets;
ā¢ the empirical effects on policy priorities;
ā¢ the normative effects on discourses and narratives;
ā¢ the choice of specific indicators used and the effects created; and
ā¢ alternative indicators that could have been used.4
Evaluative Framework: Human Development and Human Rights
In evaluating these empirical (policy) and normative (knowledge) effects, the studies in this issue were concerned with whether they furthered the vision of the Millennium Declaration for people-centered and inclusive development. More specifically, the evaluative criteria are derived from the human rights and human capabilities approaches to development.5
The MDGs originated in the Declaration (United Nations 2000), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2000. The Declaration is a normative document in which world leaders defined their key objectives for the twenty-first century. It is motivated by shared values, as set out in its first chapter, including: freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature and shared responsibility (United Nations 2000, para. 1). It commits governments to a particular pattern of growth and development, which is equitable and supports human rights (Fukuda-Parr 2012; Langford, Sumner, and Yamin 2013). The Declarationās goals were first introduced as MDGs in the 2001 āRoad Mapā document (United Nations 2001). The Road Map was the Secretary Generalās implementation plan for the Declaration, created for the purposes of āharmonizing reportingā on progress.
The Declaration, and in turn the MDGs, appeared following a decade of efforts to redefine the development agenda throughout the 1990s, to focus on improving human well-being as the central objective of development rather than on the economic performance. Central to these attempts were the series of UN development conferences including the 1990 World Summit for Children in New York, the Jomtien Conference on Education in 1990, the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio, the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the World Social Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen in 1994, the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, and the 1996 Conference on Human Settlements in Istanbul. These conferences were highly participatory events, which included a broad range of stakeholders including civil society groups, development agencies, and government representatives of sectoral agencies as well as representatives of ministries of foreign affairs (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2007). Many of the Declarations and Agendas for Action adopted at these conferences emphasized the promotion of human rights as a central principle behind the development priorities in question. Another common theme of these Declarations, driven no doubt in reaction to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, was the emphasis on reducing exclusion and inequality and guiding the global economy to a path of inclusive globalization (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Development 2007).
Implicit in much of the language of these Conference Declarations was a conceptual approach to development rooted in the international human rights framework, as well as the human development framework. While human rights and human development are distinct conceptual frameworks, each with its own intellectual origins and histories, they are closely related6 (UN OHCHR 2006; Sen 2005; Vizard, Fukuda-Parr, and Elson 2011).
Human rights have different meanings in different contexts; they are ethical principles as well as legal norms, and the way they have been used in development discourse and practiceāand even among authors in this issueāis h...
