Toward a Post-2015 Development Paradigm

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Toward a Post-2015 Development Paradigm

Overview

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) Societies and The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) convened distinguished development experts from around the world to discuss a post-2015 development paradigm in Geneva, February 14–15, 2011.

The premise of the conference was that development should be about equity and equality. Ideas proposed in this conference are supposed to be fed to the United Nations (UN) High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, which is tasked with finding a new blueprint for a sustainable future. They will also be delivered to the preparatory processes for the IFRC General Assembly in November 2011, the G20 work on development and the UN Conference on Sustainable Development(Rio 2012).

List of questions

• Should the post-MDGs agenda look like the MDGs we have now?

• Recognizing that we cannot be exhaustive, how many goals should there be?

• Are the MDGs about ends only or do we design the goals to include the means?

• While we must maintain measurability, what about quality considerations?

• Goals must be feasible, but how do we maximize the aspirational dimension?

• How do we embed equality of opportunity?

• Should we include interim targets?

• Before we get to goals, targets and indicators, given that there are different views of well-being, are we after a devolved version of well-being, derived perhaps from a deliberative dialogue using new technologies?

• Should the focus be on extreme poverty and hunger, or on (much tougher to come to agreement) global challenges everybody faces?

Should there be a goal on food security, communicable diseases, atmospheric carbon, equality or population growth (reducing fertility growth to 2.2 replacement)?

• Should there be goals on foreign direct investment (FDI), access to finance, anti-corruption, improved life for slum dwellers, trade access (quota and tariff free), connectivity (information and communication technologies [ICT], electricity, transportation) and brain drain?

• Should the current health goals be consolidated into one goal?

• How do we introduce sustainability considerations?

• Is it too ambitious (too aspirational) to include military expenditures (since the arms industry is the largest in the world, distorting development)?

• What do the populations of emerging economies think about becoming donors?

Ideas broadly put forward

The participants were neither in favour of maintaining the status quo nor merely extending the time frame beyond 2015 with new values for the same set of targets.

They were in broad support of:

• Development de-linked from aid;

• Defining development in enabling terms of freedoms, rights and levels of human dignity (measurement not based on material gains);

• Refining the MDGs to be a more effective communication tool — we need a simple persuasive forward-looking story, based on facts;

The MDGs contextualized in terms of all the commitments — legal commitments and action plans;

• Number of goals at 10 or less and not more than 20 targets;

• Global-level goals with regional and local-level targets, monitored by transnational processes.Country-specific prescriptions are important; despite the need for global goals, nations must be able to adapt the goals to a local context;

• Goals for climate change, food insecurity (food prices will be volatile, with increasing demands to mitigate for the poorest), sustainability and agriculture;

• Goals to reflect empowerment, transparency and accountability;

• Targets on connectivity (ICT, electricity);

• Consultations with the poor, soliciting their views;

• The future process, some legitimate body should set out three simple questions (for example, what are the three most important goals, the most important unmet goal and two other goals that need global solutions?) on a website and exploit appropriate ICT, with global sampling, engaging as many people as possible, North and South, consolidate the answers and feed into Rio 2012;

• The “untouchable” questions are the things that most need to be addressed — the way we frame them is what matters; and

• New technologies provide for new possibilities for engagement and dialogue.

See also

Millennium Development Goal

Beyond2015

Development

CIGI

References

External links

• [ http://www.cigionline.org/publications/2011/3/toward-post-2015-development-paradigm-1 Toward a Post-2015 Development Paradigm]