Targeting Development

Richard Black, Howard White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134410798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Millennium Development Goals accepted by the UN in 2000 are, along with the targets set by the OECD in 1996 the subject of this expertly written book. Is development achievable in the time frames given? How useful were the goals in the first place? How far have we come in solving the aching problems of the developing world? These questions and

1 Millennium Development Goals
A drop in the ocean?

Howard White and Richard Black

Introduction

What are the development targets, such as the International Development Targets and the Millennium Development Goals, for? For supporters, they are a crystallisation of what it is that international development is supposed to be about. The Targets are seven quantifiable goals, against which the performance of donors and international development agencies can be measured. First set out in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) document Shaping the Twenty-First Century (OECD, 1996), they won unprecedented support and prominence. In the UK in particular, the Department for International Development (DFID), and its former Secretary of State, Clare Short, was vocal in promoting the International Development Targets. They have occupied a central position in two government White Papers, the public pronouncements of the Secretary of State, and within DFID in developing its new anti-poverty strategy. Meanwhile, agreement on the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ at the Millennium Summit in New York in September 2000 has extended the number of agreed targets to eighteen, although some are not precisely defined.¹

Yet there have been many previous development goals and targets over the decades. International development agencies and donors have sought to promote economic growth, and then ‘growth with equity’; in the 1980s there was then a shift towards the meeting of ‘basic needs’, before the rhetoric of ‘sustainable development’ took over in the 1990s. Why, then, is this set of goals and targets new? Do they justify analysis, or are they simply a passing fad? Clearly, our argument is that they do merit attention. As a comprehensive and measurable set of indicators, the International Development Targets and the successor Millennium Development Goals have established themselves as a major force in current development practice. They help to define both the goal of development cooperation activities, and a set of priorities to be followed within these activities. They sit alongside other international goals and targets, notably those relating to climate change that followed from the Earth Summit in 1992. International targets also stand as a basis on which development practitioners can be held accountable for their actions.

This does not mean, however, that the targets are, or should be universally accepted as, a guide and measure of international development performance. It is clear, for example, that they are more significant for some donors than for others. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) both adopted the International Development Targets, and they became a reference point for the World Bank’s annual flagship statistical publication World Development Indicators. However, for most other donors they did not assume the importance they did for DFID, although the Millennium Development Goals have gained greater prominence. Both the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank have Web sites dedicated to the Millennium Development Goals, with links from their home pages. The extent to which the targets have influenced strategy and programmes is of course another matter, one which is pursued throughout this volume. Whilst growing out of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), and endorsed by the United Nations (UN), the targets have already arguably been overtaken for some, especially in the US administration, by new concerns to tie development assistance to security issues in the post-11 September ‘war on terrorism’. Moreover, although quite broad in their conception of poverty, and ranging across several different sectors, the targets could still be seen as quite limited and narrow in their scope – more basic even than ‘basic needs’. Some would reject the contention that the goals of international development practice can be reduced to a set of quantifiable indicators, whilst the action required to achieve these goals could be perceived as rather unambitious. In this sense, are the International Development Targets and the successor Millennium Development Goals simply a drop in the ocean?

It is the aim of this chapter to examine what the International Development Targets and Millennium Development Goals are trying to achieve, and whether it is worth achieving. Subsequent chapters then follow up specific aspects of an approach based on targets, before focusing attention on the extent to which progress is being made towards meeting various individual targets. This chapter begins with a brief introduction to the targets as measures of performance, and why they have gained in importance. We then move on to discuss the extent to which the International Development Targets and Millennium Development Goals really matter, and some of the problems that are inherent in their adoption. Finally, we provide a summary of how the argument is taken forward in subsequent chapters.

What are the International Development Targets and Millennium Development Goals?

The International Development Targets

The International Development Targets are diverse both in nature and provenance (Table 1.1). Divided into three fields – economic well-being, social development and environmental sustainability and regeneration – they collectively represent a set of goals for poverty reduction, embodying a multidimensional conception of poverty (Baulch, 1996; White, 1999). The targets demonstrate that in current development practice, poverty is about more than just a lack of income. Instead, drawing on the work of the UNDP on ‘human development’, and a series of UN conferences through the 1990s, they extend to include deprivation with respect to other aspects of well-being such as health and education.

The targets share a number of characteristics. First, each is designed to be quantifiable, although in some cases this causes difficulty. In particular, there is no agreed indicator for access to reproductive health services. Contraceptive prevalence is commonly used as an indicator, but is not acceptable in some cultures, whilst the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is forbidden by law to support programmes that provide abortion services. Even where contraceptive prevalence is acceptable, there is no agreed target level, since the desired level depends on desired fertility.

Second, most of the targets define the expected outcomes of development, rather than inputs in the form of resources. This, for example, sets them apart from the best known of previous development targets – that developed nations should set aside 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) in development assistance. However, here too there are exceptions. Thus the target on environmental sustainability stresses the need for national-level planning, rather than any particular environmental outcome, whilst targets for reproductive health and education stress access to services rather than health or educational results.

Third, accompanying the targets as a whole is a statement recognising the importance of qualitative factors related to governance. The current consensus amongst the international community is that democratic accountability and a lack of corruption are necessary to achieve poverty reduction goals. Although there are numerical indicators for such things (such as those produced by Freedom House on political freedom and civil liberties),² they have not been used to monitor progress. This is because donors have been unable to reach agreement on what should go into such indicators. In this context, ‘good governance’ is less a goal in itself, and more a precondition for meeting the development targets.

Confusingly, the targets too have not remained fixed. An additional target was added on HIV/AIDS, namely a 25 per cent reduction in HIV infection rates amongst 15 to 24-year-olds in the worst-affected countries by 2005 and globally by 2010. Meanwhile, the rather general target on environmental sustainability was altered to include more specific goals, including some ‘outcomes’ in terms of protection, energy use and emissions. There are also more indicators that can be used to measure progress than those explicitly mentioned in the definition of each target. A list of indicators has been developed around each target (Table 1.2), many of which are also outcome indicators. In the three cases in which the target itself does not measure outcome (education, reproductive health and environment), some of the related indicators do so (e.g. literacy rates and fertility rates). In other cases, the additional indicators listed do not measure outcomes, but provide a quantifiable indicator of access to a service that critically affects the desired outcome (e.g. attended births).

Table 1.1 The International Development Targets

The International Development Targets were formally adopted at the Thirty-Fourth High-Level Meeting of the DAC on 6–7 May 1996 in Paris. Given the recent prominence of ‘participatory’ approaches to development, and the fact that the targets themselves are conceived as part of the process of making development assistance more accountable to aid beneficiaries (see pp. 12–13), it is somewhat ironic that it was a developed country group such as DAC that set targets for developing countries.

Table 1.2 Target-related indicators

There are two defences against this criticism. First, developing country governments do not have to sign up to precisely these poverty reduction goals. Rather, the idea is that donor support should be predicated upon recipient commitment to poverty reduction, measured against an appropriate target that they may choose themselves. For example, the target of the Ugandan government is to reduce the poverty head count to 10 per cent or less by 2016, in addition to meeting specific target figures for infant and child mortality. Second, the International Development Targets were based on resolutions passed at various international conferences, and in this sense they have already been endorsed by developing countries. Nonetheless, in some cases it is the principle rather than the specific target that was adopted at UN conferences. This is the case, for example, with the target set for reduction in income poverty.

The Millennium Development Goals

The discontent felt in some quarters that the International Development Targets represented an imposition by the developed country members of the Development Assistance Committee manifested itself at the Millennium Summit in New York held on 6–8 September 2000. There, an alternative set of development targets, the Millennium Development Goals, was adopted (UN, 2000). The Millennium Declaration contained a list of goals which overlapped with the International Development Targets but were not the same. However, a year later the UN document Road Map towards the Implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration laid out a finally agreed list of Millennium Development Goals as shown in Table 1.3. This list fully encompassed the earlier targets, whilst adding new elements of its own.³ The most notable differences between the two sets of targets are as follows:

• There are more Millennium Development Goals than International Development Targets, comprising eight goals with eighteen separate targets (although seven of these targets relate to the new eighth goal of global partnership); there is an expanded list of forty-eight indicators to monitor the targets (which are still under development).
• The International Development Targets are embodied in the first seven Goals, but with additional aspects added, notably nutrition, shelter and diseases other than HIV/AIDS.
• Although governance indicators are still generally absent, female representation in parliament is included amongst the expanded set of indicators for gender equality.

Table 1.3 The Millennium Development Goals

• The new eighth goal adds targets relating to the direct contribution of the developed countries to meeting the Millennium Development Goals, with mention of aid, debt relief and tariff barriers. It is significant that such actions (e.g. debt reduction, higher aid) have been added. However, the wording of most of these is vague (‘address . . . ’, ‘deal comprehensively with . . . ’, ‘more generous . . . ’, etc.) compared to the precise numerical goals for developing country performance.

With the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, the prominence of the targets has increased amongst donor agencies. The extent to which these targets represent a valuable set of measures on which to assess international development performance is considered in more depth in Chapter 3.

Why have targets gained importance?

Why have first the International Development Targets, and now the Millennium Development Goals, gained an importance that escaped previous development targets? Three reasons suggest themselves. The first is the establishment of poverty at the top of the development agenda during the 1990s. Of course, poverty has always been a concern for development agencies, though the extent to which it has received explicit attention has varied greatly across time, and between different agencies. Yet during the 1990s nearly all development agencies have reaffirmed and strengthened their commitment to poverty reduction and have been searching for ways in which to realise this commitment. The end of the Cold War in some respects released development aid from its political straitjacket, allowing greater autonomy for development agencies in the definition of their objectives. Thus in the UK, DFID was able to steer an International Development Act through Parliament in early 2002, which defined the objective of development as the eradication of poverty.⁴

Adoption of the International Development Goals, and subsequently the Millennium Development Goals, has been part of this process. For example, for DFID, the targets have been internalised into agency practice, setting out in concrete terms the general orientation towards poverty eradication. The new formulation has been designed not only to act as a guide for action, but also as a bulwark against the diversion of aid that was perceived by some in government and outside to have occurred in the past – notably incidents such as the linking of UK development aid for the Pergau Dam in Malaysia to the sale of arms. Nonetheless, there have been countervailing tendencies – notably the increased role played by humanitarian assistance, and the rise of politicalmilitary involvement in this sector both before, but especially after, 11 September 2001.

Second, the 1990s also saw an emerging emphasis on results-based management (RBM), especially in North America. For example, the World Bank adopted this approach in 1993, whilst in 1995 the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) produced an overview of its experience (Brown, 1995).⁵ Of course, donors have always aimed to have some sort of monitoring at the project level, albeit often with an input focus. Project monitoring is carried out both by the project management and, often drawing on that, by agency staff for their own purposes through supervision missions, mid-term reviews and the like. For example, the World Bank has ‘Project Performance Reports’,⁶ which are completed for each project following a staff mission to the project, usually on an annual basis. These reports include an assessment of performance on several criteria and overall development impact as judged against the project objectives. However, the rise of results-based management has shifted the focus to country programmes and the agency’s overall performance (DAC, 2000: 18).

Once again, results orientation has taken a particular hold in the UK. It first emerged in the 1990s, notably with the introduction of the Citizen’s Charter, and league tables for schools. Since 1997, the Labour government that took office in that year has warmly embraced this approach, starting with its five pre-election pledges and continuing, for example, with the expansion of league t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Millennium Development Goals: A Drop In the Ocean?
• 2. Heaven or Hubris: Reflections On the New ‘New Poverty Agenda’
• 3. Using Development Goals and Targets for Donor Agency Performance Measurement
• 4. Using Development Goals to Design Country Strategies
• 5. Monitoring Progress Towards the Millennium Development Goals At Country Level
• 6. Are the Millennium Development Goals Feasible?
• 7. Halving World Poverty
• 8. Towards Universal Primary Education
• 9. Promoting Gender Equality
• 10. Reducing Infant and Child Death
• 11. Towards Reproductive Health for All?
• 12. The Global Challenge of HIV/AIDS
• 13. Clean Water for All
• 14. Achieving Sustainability In Africa
• 15. Building a Global Partnership for Development?
• 16. Aid, Trade and Debt: How Equal Is the Global Partnership?