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What’s Not to Like About the Millennium Development Goals? Todd Moss and Michael Clemens Weigh In.
September 18, 2010
Leaders from around the world meet in New York City next week to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, a list of development targets set in 2000, after a decade of UN conferences and summits, for achievement by 2015. Ahead of the MDG Summit, I spoke with Michael Clemens and Todd Moss, senior fellows at the Center for Global Development and outspoken critics of the design and implementation of the MDGs. On the Global Prosperity Wonkcast, we discuss where Todd and Michael think that the MDG effort went wrong, and how it could be better going forward.
Undoubtedly, the MDGs have achieved one objective: they have provided a focal point for development advocates to make the case for increased foreign aid in rich country capitals. The MDGs have “been tremendously successful at getting the aid budget up,” Todd allows. What they have not done, he says, is to “focus development goals in a way that’s useful for countries.” Both Todd and Michael say that applying global targets—such as 100% school enrollment and universal access to AIDS treatment—to individual countries is a recipe for failure.
HEAR THE WONKCAST
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Who Are The Millennium Development Goal Trailblazers? – Ben Leo
At the United Nations MDG Summit: Don’t Forget MDG 8 and Trade! – Kimberly Ann Elliott
Are the MDGs Useful for Africa? – Todd Moss
What Next for the Millennium Development Goals? – Todd Moss
On the Road to Universal Primary Education – Ruth Levine and Nancy Birdsall
The Long Walk to School: International Education Goals in Historical Perspective – Michael Clemens
What’s wrong with aiming high? “I can see the benefits of aiming for the stars and maybe you’ll hit the barn, but I see drawbacks to those goals as well,” Michael responds. Already, there is the perception that Africa is a place where nothing is going right, he laments. “By constantly portraying failure, even in cases where countries are making enormous progress…we contribute to that vision of inevitable disaster.”
Another major flaw with the MDGs is the question of how (and even if!) they’re being measured. For many indicators, because data is so poor and collection so spotty, Todd says, even when we reach the finish line in 2015, “We will have no idea if we’ve met them.” Going forward, Todd and Michael recommend carefully separating goals that are to be used as global symbols (“eradicating poverty”) from those that are used to measure progress at the country level. Towards the end of our conversation, we discuss how this might work and lay out a few metrics (Todd likes a jobs indicator, Michael wants an economic growth indicator) that might be added to a future set of MDGs.
Listen to the Wonkcast, then write to me to tell me what you think, or post a comment below. If you use iTunes, I invite you to subscribe to get a new episode delivered to your computer every week.
My thanks to Wren Elhai for his very able production assistance on the Wonkcast recording and for drafting this blog post.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Possibly related Wonkcasts:
- Ben Leo: Who Are The Millennium Development Goal Trailblazers?
- A Report Card for the African Development Bank: Todd Moss
- The Gulf Gusher & Africa’s Offshore Oil Boom: Todd Moss and Vijaya Ramachandran
9 Responses to “What’s Not to Like About the Millennium Development Goals? Todd Moss and Michael Clemens Weigh In.”
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September 20th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
After three decades in the development game, I just see the same debates revolving and going nowhere. Various commentators have criticised the MDG circus for being donor-led rather than recipient-led. Forget it. Go back to first principles and think from there: What can we BUY in poor countries with just money? That is all we have – we are outsiders. Then unpack the incentive structures on both sides – the givers and the receivers.
“Givers” demand value-for-investment; Auditor Generals, tax payers and their politicians do not understand fungibility or that “endemic” (as in “endemic corruption”) means everywhere. So donors play the great game, with full support from the receivers, to demonstrate returns and hide failed projects. It is a “moral hazard” nightmare (exacerbated by the lack of accountability of multi-lateral organisations), where no organisation – giver or receiver – has an incentive to report failed investments (which explains why evaluation is never taken seriously).
“Giver” organisations must show they caused policy outcomes, and the global MDG events are one forum for doing that – to secure their future funding, nothing more. The “voice” of developed country leaders is irrelevant (let alone those below them). It would be tokenism anyway – a few “donor darlings” there to endorse more ODA for their country. Many developing country leaders are, of course, appalling, often brutal. They would face mild criticism from the less diplomatic donors, agree on future challenges and MDG priorities, while at home lock up opposing politicians, do nothing for women, ignore HIV/AIDS.
Giver/Receiver realpolitik analysis is needed to remove so much fluff, jargon and misguided good intentions. It can lead to more effective ODA: local systems will not be strengthened because you give them money, drop “ownership” and manage the big investments yourself; forget general budget support, use targeting sector BS with explicit conditions (“business contracts”); bypass central governments where possible (cash transfers, community development funds, local NGOs). In short, stop being naive about the nature and intentions of “receivers” – treat then as a necessary but rather untrustworthy business partner. All balanced by a more mature realisation that we cannot buy or even induce policy reforms.
Some recommendations above sound like “old fashioned” aid? Yes, indeed, because the new modalities are predicated on the false assumption that they can foster institutional and policy change: “Buying policies did not work (conditionality), so let’s try infiltration of local systems to leverage reform outcomes”. That doesn’t work either. Developing country leaders change what they want when they want – public administration, public investment planning, state enterprises, the financial sector. We can supply technical assistance WHEN they are ready, but we waste so much prior to that trying to force political decisions and pretending to ourselves that the key issues are lack of technical skills or “awareness” about choices (the “better evaluation” problem is also not an awareness issue). So if we stop trying to infiltrate, we can focus, for example, on how to get the most infrastructure built for a given budget – and that brings some more traditional modalities back into consideration (as well as spending a larger share on infrastructure – which money can indeed buy).
As for us “givers”, consultants and donor organizations must continue to play the accountability games demanded by those who give us funding. So enjoy the MDG event.
September 20th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Should we not use the current opportunity to aim for country specific MDGs? These would be far more context-appropriate and sensitive to country realities and would enable donors and countries to get behind a specific set of targets in each country.
Anthony Zwi
a.zwi@unsw.edu.au
Professor
GlobalHealth@UNSW
University of New South Wales
Sydney
September 21st, 2010 at 12:55 am
“Aid budget up” is a success if “money in, results out” is correct theory. But if the exact type of aid matters, it is far from obvious that bigger budgets are better. Bigger budgets bring baggage.
September 22nd, 2010 at 10:42 am
Aidwatch and Clemens/Moss have criticized the MDG’s for the following reasons:
• The goals are not evidence-based and there are no real systems for measuring progress or even knowing whether we are reaching them.
• The goals are unrealistic for the poorest countries and even countries that are making significant progress in the areas of the goals will be portrayed as failures.
• No one has been held accountable for the goals. Responsibility for achieving them is so diffuse that we have no way of knowing who or what is helping to achieve the MDG’s and what has failed and should be stopped.
• Even as an awareness raising tool, they have done poorly.
• They have not paid sufficient attention to the importance of economic growth and trade.
I agree with most of these criticisms, but I think they have missed the most important part of what is wrong with the MDG’s. The biggest problem with the MDG’s is they were conceived, promoted and driven by the international development community from donor nations. They are another manifestation of the top-down approach to development that leads to lack of true ownership and local problem solving that is at the heart of real development. Yes, there has been the usual process of getting leaders from poor nations to commit to the goals, but these are artificial exercises that are a part of the rituals of diplomacy that no one should mistake for real ownership.
Moreover, I think one of the worst things that could happen would be to create a massive system of accountability for achieving the targets and tracking of quantitative targets year by year. When the starting point is an externally owned, top down approach, managing to results with close measuring of progress can be a dangerous thing. Some of the experience with PEPFAR and the Abuja targets is instructive. By the time the lofty goal is broken down to a yearly target in a specific district that a sub grantee is accountable for, you have a system of incentives that keeps people focused on achieving short term process indicators and ignoring the larger issues of progress around the problem that the target was intended to solve. So, instead of making sure people are really changing their behavior to adopt safe sex practices, you have people just counting heads at awareness raising sessions. Instead of making sure that mosquito nets are being used by people most at risk, you have people focused on distribution targets. The process indicators inevitably take precedent over the outcomes.
I recently met with an official at a global malaria control program to discuss the fact that private sector contributions to malaria control were being marginalized and that even while coverage was improving, the health system was becoming less efficient and less sustainable. Although the official agreed with my analysis of the situation, she said that they couldn’t think about sustainability or efficiency until they achieved the Abuja targets. This is my biggest fear about the MDG’s.
So if we have to have the MDG’s let’s just use them to fundraise, to raise awareness about important problems, but please don’t build any global implementation systems around them. Country leaders need to take responsibility for setting their own targets that are based on their resources, their needs and their priorities.
September 23rd, 2010 at 12:25 pm
@Adam McCarty: Thanks very much for these candid comments, which are clearly based on extensive real-world experience (more than my own). There is some interesting recent scholarship on the impacts of bypassing governments with direct cash transfers, including here and here.
I definitely agree with you that “the ‘better evaluation’ problem is also not an awareness issue”, as Lant Pritchett has written. To me it is a transparency issue. Better evaluation means it’s harder for governments to claim that a politically-driven project had impacts that it did not have. Better evaluation is thus part of improving governance and incentives both in recipient governments and donor governments.
September 23rd, 2010 at 3:49 pm
@Joe Ryan: Thanks very much. As Todd and I have written, focusing on budgetary targets distracts from innovating on the effectiveness of aid. One of many interesting proposals to innovate on effectiveness is Nancy Birdsall’s proposal for Cash-on-Delivery aid. The thing that captivates me about her proposal is the fact that it gets the incentives right: no results = less money. The thing that troubles me about the MDG Summit is that its message is exactly the opposite: no results = more money.
September 23rd, 2010 at 4:03 pm
@Jeff Barnes: Thank you, I really appreciate this thoughtful comment.
I connect directly to your point via some work I did on MDG#2, the school completion goal. For example, it is completely impossible for Niger to have 100% primary school completion by five years from now. That goal is useless to the Nigerien minister of education. And at the international level, as you point out Jeff, it would likewise be unhelpful to have some large overarching mechanism to hold donors or the Nigerien government ‘accountable’ for reaching a goal that is impossible and was set in a way that is totally divorced from Niger’s context.
What would be helpful instead would be to have national and local mechanisms of accountability for targets that are set nationally and locally to reflect Niger’s context. This is how the United States reached universal primary education. For the U.S. it was not an international accountability system or a centralized top-down national plan, but something that each state pushed for with its own complex systems of local and state accountability, when it was ready. Massachusetts led the way by declaring compulsory primary education in 1852, but all states did not adopt this requirement until 1918. Each state set its goals, and created mechanisms to achieve those goals, in context.
September 23rd, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Michael–
Thanks for the response and the reference. I couldn’t agree more about local goals AND local accountability. I am irritated beyond belief when I read statements from international NGO’s about holding African leaders to their MDG commitments. To put it undiplomatically, the MDG’s have been foisted on most African leaders and if anyone should hold them to meeting these targets it should be African voters. These are national policy decisions, not global ones. Moreover, the closer goals and targets are established and monitored to the operational level, the less likely they are to be “gamed”. These truths have been lost in the hoopla about the MDGs.
September 27th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Michael,
I am puzzled by your comment (#5 above) pointing to research on the impact of bypassing governments with direct cash transfers. While “Just Give Money to the Poor” does suggest that bypassing governments would be more efficient (with little supporting evidence), the World Bank paper does not discuss whether CCT may be more or less efficient if the government is involved. The experiment seems to have taken place without government involvement, but that in itself doesn’t make it a discussion of the impact of bypassing the government. In fact, the word “government” appears only once in the whole paper.