CFR-Charting The Future of Global Development
CFR-Charting The Future of Global Development
CFR-Charting The Future of Global Development
The best practical answer to date comes from the Korean Development Institute (KDI) and the Canada-based Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), which recently released a glossy report, titled Post-2015 Development Agenda: Goals, Targets and Indicators. Dont let the soporific title fool you. This short document is an engaging, incisive and timely contribution to debates on the future development agenda. The authors eleven goals include: 1. Inclusive growth for dignified livelihoods and adequate standards of living: The KDI-CIGI initiative wisely focuses on broadly shared economic growth as the sine qua non of development. 2. Sufficient food and water for active living: This goal responds to growing concerns about water scarcity and food price volatility, as well as the need for adequate nutrition, not simply caloric intake. 3. Appropriate education and skills for full participation in society: Whereas the MDGs focused on grade school enrollment and childhood literacy, this replacement goal encompasses secondary and tertiary education. 4. Good health for the best possible physical, mental, and social well-being: The KDI-CIGI report wisely integrates all global health targets under one single goal. It also addresses not only infectious disease but the growing burden posed by non-communicable diseases. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of health system strengtheningas opposed to stove-piped, single disease interventions. 5. Security for ensuring freedom from violence: Among the MDGs biggest lacunae was inattention to human insecurity (including war, crime, and domestic violence) as a limiting factor to development. Closing this gap is critical, particularly in engaging fragile states. 6. Gender equality enabling men and women in society to participate and benefit equally in society: Reflecting the importance of women in the development process, the report calls for steps to advance the physical, economic, and decision making autonomy of women across societies. 7. Resilient communities and nations through disaster risk reduction: Growing global vulnerability to natural disastersranging from drought to hurricanes underlines the need for all societies to invest in preparedness and recovery systems. 8. Quality infrastructure for universal access to energy, transportation and communication: In an age of globalization, development depends on connectivity. The authors thus include targets for increased access to energy, transportation networks, and communications technology. 9. Empowering people to realize their civil and political rights: This proposed goal is both the most controversial and the most important. While authoritarian regimes may bluster, long-term development requires that people participate in the political process, possess civil rights, have access to rule of law, and can hold their governments accountable. 10. Sustainable management of the biosphere, enabling people and the planet to thrive together: Building on the Rio+20 conference, the authors propose steps to break from business as usual, including putting a price on the ecological costs of economic activity. 11. Global governance and equitable rules for realizing human potential: Finally, the report proposes sweeping reform of international institutions to advance development globally. This potential agenda is so massive and complex that the authors might wish to limit themselves to an even ten goals or focus on
specific shortcomings in the global economy that represent enormous barriers to development. One of the reports most distinctiveand perhaps controversialrecommendations is that progress toward these goals be measured in all countries, including advanced market democracies. While one can imagine outcries from some sovereignty-minded conservatives about being judged by the international community, there is no reason the United States should not voluntarily embrace, domestically, a set of universal, non-binding goals for human betterment broadly consistent with its own political and economic idealsas well as the development agenda it has long pursued abroad. After all, as philosopher Amartya Sen has written, the most compelling definition for development is freedom.