Reproducing Inequalities through Development: The MDGs and the Politics of Method

Abstract

This article is a critical inquiry into particular methodological means underlying analyses of development, inequalities, and poverty in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) discourse. A populist approach to poverty reduction, the MDG initiative has gained much exposure at the expense of a closer scrutiny of the specific methodological premises (and their implications) underlining the development frameworks through which the goals were to be realized. A critical examination of premises of this kind demonstrates the way in which the application of specific methods in analyses of development and poverty is carefully crafted to serve discernible ideological ends. In order to explicate this by way of an example, I draw on MDG1 (and target 2 with reference to hunger), which I discuss in relation to its integration with the overarching development objective of realizing economic growth. My aim is to demonstrate how dominant explanations and understandings of poverty and hunger, social struggles for fundamental entitlements, and ultimately ‘development’, are construed in ways that are premised on abstractions from actual social and political relations; they are framed as ‘independent variables’ external to the very policies and strategies of international development. The critical engagement offered in my analysis is timely, given the extent to which the MDG initiative and the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals agenda have been presented without any attempt to answer to decades (and more) of critical arguments that offer more rigorous and sustained understandings of inequalities, including deprivations of basic life sustaining needs and fundamental entitlements.     

Sexual Violence and the MDGs

ABSTRACT

Sexual violence is multi-faceted. Three (overlapping) categories can be distinguished: violence that is sexual in nature, gender-based violence, and sexuality-based violence. The latter refers to violence against persons because of their sexuality and/or their (presumed) sexual behavior. Being female, young, poor, and living in a sexually conservative culture and/or in conflict areas appear to be important risk factors for sexual violence. Sexual violence is widespread (one in five girls worldwide are sexually abused in childhood and up to three-quarters of women in some countries have been victimized by a partner), but prevalence figures around the globe are hard to compare. Both the individual and society suffer from sexual violence. The eradication of sexual violence is directly relevant to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) related to infant and maternal health and mortality, and combating HIV/AIDS. And certainly no less important, it is very closely linked to the MDGs related to gender equality and the empowerment of women, poverty, and primary education for all. Campaigning against sexual violence against women has been presented as one of the ‘quick wins’ in progress towards achieving the MDGs by the UN Millennium Project. Many good practices have been employed in political-legal, awareness raising, prevention, and health care domains, but important setbacks are noteworthy as well. Priority number one for the World Association for Sexual Health now seems to be to adequately and strategically contribute to the continuous efforts to integrate sexual health into the Millennium Development framework.     

Special Forum on the Millennium Development Goals: Introduction

Abstract

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight time-bound targets aiming, amongst other issues, to reduce extreme poverty, address school enrollment and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, expire in September 2015. World leaders, civil society organisations, philanthropists, and the private sector are all frantically negotiating and consulting over what will follow them. This special forum in Globalizations is dedicated to questions which explore the politics of the MDGs, and the subsequent discussions which are framing their successor development framework, the Sustainable Development Goals. Most research into the MDGs tends to be technocratic, addressing issues of how we might achieve the goals better, faster, and more efficiently. Questions of what kinds of societies might be created by the achievement of the goals, and what alternative societies people living in poverty might wish to build for themselves tend to get left aside, as do questions which address the fundamentally capitalocentric logics which underpin the MDGs. This special forum introduction briefly explores some of these issues before introducing the contributors, who include leading scholars on the critical politics and international political economy of international development, such as Suzan Ilcan, Philip McMichael, Kathleen Sexsmith, Carl Death, Japhy Wilson, Anita Lacey, Maia Green, and Heloise Weber.     

Situating social work within the post-2015 Global Agenda

ABSTRACT

The launch of the post-2015 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations (UN) initiates a new set of global priorities to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Over a three-year process, governments and civil society representatives at the UN planned and negotiated the post-2015 Agenda and a set of SDGs and targets. Unlike the MDGs which focused almost entirely on developing countries, the new agenda is intended to be universal and therefore applicable to Europe and North America. The goals address a wide range of issues including poverty and inequality, health, international trade, climate change and gender, with a strong emphasis on the environment. This article will provide an overview of the post-2015 process and explore the implications of this agenda for social work globally and locally. It will highlight areas of particular interest to the profession, especially prospects for addressing growing global inequality within and between countries, and concerns over the role of human rights protection. The advantages and limitations of linking social work’s global agenda to the new UN priorities will be assessed.     

Doing Biopolitics Differently? Radical Potential in the Post-2015 MDG and SDG Debates

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been critiqued as an ambitious project which sought to produce entrepreneurial neo-liberal subjects. From this perspective, the opportunities and dangers of the post-2015 debates acquire a more urgent importance than the cynical dismissal of the MDGs as ‘minimum development goals’. This article identifies two potentially radical shifts in development discourse offered by the proposals for global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): first, that they might be genuinely global and hence destabilise long-standing divisions between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ societies; and second, that they might challenge existing growth paths of resource-intensive development. Two scenarios are offered through which these potential shifts are manifesting: first, a status-quo and growth-orientated outcome to the post-2015 agenda, and second, a more radical revisioning of development as a transformative project of global sustainability. However, even such an apparently attractive prospect as the latter has potential dangers, whether or not it is possible, which this article highlights. Whatever the outcome of the negotiations over the post-2015 SDGs, therefore, the process can tell us something about the opportunities and limits of processes of reform. The stakes could not be higher: whether a renewed and reshaped development project can drive future developmental governmentalities in radically new directions.     

Enacting the Millennium Development Goals: Political Technologies of Calculation and the Counter-calculation of Poverty in Namibia

Abstract

This paper advances that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) act as a governmentality that brings with them assemblages of international and national policies and practices of poverty reduction. These assemblages are characterized by neoliberal rationalities that shape relationships and practices with and of the poor themselves by repositioning and deploying the values and norms of the market as the principal means for the establishment of development aid partnerships. Such rationalities, we argue, are exercised through political technologies that make visible and operable certain governing schemes such as calculative practices. Drawing on extensive interview, policy, programme, and archival documents, the paper advances the argument that the MDGs and the national development plan for Namibia, Vision 2030, shape ideas of poverty reduction through political technologies of calculation and via multi-scale partnership arrangements. These technologies emerge from diverse elements, subsume the shaping of social and political spaces, and have diverse effects on the lives of the poor. Our analysis also highlights an approach to poverty reduction in Namibia, that of BIG, a Basic Income Grant scheme. We view BIG as a potential counter-calculation of poverty, and counter-partnership to poverty reduction efforts, which can develop into a more socially just and sustainable means to reduce poverty and lead to an overturn of contemporary neoliberal assemblages of poverty reduction.     

Addressing Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), including HIV/AIDS,in the Context of Sexual Health

ABSTRACT

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have occupied a central place in public health agendas for at least the past 500 years, but have been the subject of opinions, decrees and “moral positions” for much longer. Societies have long tried to control the sexual behaviors of their populations, not only for reasons of social control, but also with the objective of controlling the spread of disease—HIV is the latest example of how societies respond to infections spread through the most private of individual behaviors. The article outlines the burden of disease associated with sexually transmitted infections including HIV, and explores their impact on efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). A large number of options for prevention and care of the sexually transmitted infections and HIV are currently available in both resource-rich and resource-constrained settings. In this article I move beyond the narrow focus of biomedical interventions concentrated on the individual and explore the evidence for public health measures aimed at controlling these infections. Using a public health framework I outline the various measures that can be implemented for STI/HIV control, and in addition to exploring the evidence for their public health effectiveness, I also look at how each of these interventions can be delivered within a paradigm of sexual health more generally. Finally, the article proposes recommendations for which effective strategies should be incorporated into a broader framework for promoting sexual health.     

Millennium Development Goals: Impact on national strategies and spending

This study reviews the post‐2005 national development strategies of 50 countries from diverse income groups, geographical locations, human development tiers and official development assistance (ODA) levels to assess Millennium Development Goal (MDG) absorption into development planning. Reviewing Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and non‐PRSP national strategies, the majority of the development plans have either adopted the MDGs as planning tools or ‘localized’ them in a meaningful way, using diverse adaptation strategies. A high correlation is detected between the income group, PRSP status and ODA reliance of countries, and their propensity to incorporate MDGs in their planning instruments. However, MDG alignment is not coterminous with greater pro‐poor or MDG‐oriented policies. Countries that have not integrated MDGs into their national plans were as likely to allocate government funds to social sectors as MDG aligners.     

PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS FOR MATERNAL HEALTH IN AFRICA: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS

ABSTRACT

The concept of public and private partnerships raises growing interest and hope from international development agencies, governments, and communities as an alternative strategy in social welfare delivery. Conceptualized as a strategy to build and capitalize on the tangible and intangible assets and resources endogenous to social organizations and communities, individually and collectively, this article embraces an asset-based approach to analyze the potency of such a framework in enhancing maternal health care delivery in developing countries such as Senegal and Mali. These countries face growing retrenchment of the state from social service delivery and scarcity of human and financial resources, which call for innovative approaches and sustainable solutions in addressing pervasive deficits in health service delivery. Drawing from empirical field research conducted in Senegal and Mali, this article examines the trend toward public–private partnerships and its gender impacts and critically analyzes the challenges and opportunities it offers conceptually and practically to address and improve equity in health care delivery, particularly safe motherhood and maternal health care delivery in developing countries.     

Response to Greene 2001, Redefining Social Work

ABSTRACT

This article is in response to the article titled Redefining Social Work for the New Millennium: Setting a Context, by Dr. Roberta Greene. I have come to view social work as a profession that seeks to enable others not just the poor and undeserved, the opportunity to better understand and navigate any situation that causes them stress or presents some type of barrier to their health and well-being.     

Environmental Security in Transnational Contexts: What Relevance for Regional Human Security Regimes?

Abstract

The year 2015 was meant to be a seminal year in global geopolitics due to the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This transition was significant because the MDGs, even though they raised global consciousness around the need to combat poverty, remained indicator-based, and thus, they did not adequately address socio-economic inequalities and power imbalances in global affairs. For this reason, much of the discussion surrounding the definition of the SDGs and the post-2015 global development agenda contextualized sustainable development within the framework of ‘transformation’, specifically prioritizing concepts such as equity, security, justice, and rights. While these debates correctly discussed power imbalances and relational obstacles to human development they remained abstract because they focused only on the international level. In this regard, discussions did not adequately examine mechanisms that facilitate or block the emergence of sustainable development as a political priority, nor did they address specific policy proposals to link environmental justice to human development strategies. Thus, this special issue introduction argues that human and environmental security should be framed in terms of transnational discussions rather than being limited to international debates. The special issue undertakes an examination of the interactions between human and environmental security, border studies, and comparative regional integration; and interactions between competing globalizations. The articles in the special issue address the relationships between international norms, transnational human and environmental security issues, and the regionalization of governance.     

Sexual Health for the Millennium: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the International Journal of Sexual Health is devoted to the issues of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and the effort by the World Association for Sexual Health to argue that the promotion of sexual health is an essential strategy for attaining those goals. Recently, the World Association for Sexual Health has published Sexual Health for the Millennium: A Declaration and Technical Document (2008). This special issue of the IJSH contains the background papers which served as a foundation for the development of the declaration and technical document. These articles argue that sexuality is a fundamental aspect of being human, that human development must be premised on the promotion of sexual health and is a basic human right for all citizens. Public policies designed to promote human development must make the promotion of sexual health an essential strategy. This special issue is designed to stimulate more interest in the Sexual Health for the Millennium: A Declaration and Technical Document, encourage further analysis and research which will support the statements in the declaration, provoke more advocacy for sexual health, and, most importantly, to stimulate sound and effective public policies to create a sexually healthier world.     

The relevance of Kuhn's model of science to discipline development in sociology «1»

Thomas Kuhn's model of scientific development during the last two decades is reviewed critically in light of its increasing popularity in the sociology of sociology literature. This model, along with recent criticisms and rebuttals by Kuhn, is described, and the circularity of this position as a basis for paradigm development is noted. Several problems are identified for contemporary sociology. We conclude that Kuhn's model can not be used as a strategy for generating a scientific paradigm for the discipline of sociology and, at best, Kuhn's work serves only as a heuristic device for discipline analysis.     

The Millennium Development Goals: Key Current Issues and Challenges

The current global financial and economic crisis has severely impaired social and economic progress throughout the world. Does this mean the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)? This article addresses this question, considering selected theoretical and strategic issues, including new and incremental approaches, the role of governmental leadership and operational integrity and the underlying question of appropriate development paradigms. It concludes that scaling‐up of current MDG efforts is imperative, as is the adoption of new and incremental approaches.     

Mainstreaming Nutrition for Better Development Outcomes

Even though the millennium development goals (MDGs) tackle the main economic and social problems in developing countries, nutrition is not addressed adequately despite its important role in achieving the MDGs. It is therefore crucial to mainstream nutrition by strengthening public-private partnerships, increased political and technical capacity and by achieving food security. The paper aims to discuss how strong partnerships bringing public and private efforts together are important to the success of increasing nutritional programs by providing a redesign and marketing of products and services, other services, and funding. The report explores the need to assess the setting of pertinent nutritional policies and to increase technical capacity. The study found that the relation between agriculture and nutrition is a key component for achieving food safety in order to mainstream nutrition into the MDGs. The three main topics considered in this analysis are biotechnology, food trade policies, and bioenergy products as they have a strong impact on prices. Mainstreaming Nutrition for better development outcomes.

Politics of ‘Leaving No One Behind’: Contesting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda

Abstract

In this article, I develop a critical analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda and its commitment to ‘leave no one behind’. The Preamble to the Resolution on the SDGs adopted by the United Nations General Assembly stated the following: ‘We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet. (…) As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind’. Through a close examination of the SDG initiative—and aligned concrete policy proposals—I demonstrate that the project to ‘leave no one behind’ rests on specific ideological premises: it is designed to promote and consolidate a highly contested neo-liberal variant of capitalist development. The SDGs are framed as a universal project, with quite substantial institutional monitoring mechanisms aimed at ensuring the successful implementation of aligned policies. Indeed, as I demonstrate, the implementation of highly contested neoliberal policies are themselves explicit goals of the SDG agenda. In this respect, the SDGs differ significantly from the Millennium Development Goal initiative. The argument I develop demonstrates that the SDG agenda may be aimed in part at undermining political struggles that aspire for more socially just and ecologically sustainable approaches to development. Overall, I argue that the explicit commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ is a discourse that is strategically deployed to justify the implementation of a highly problematic political project as the framework of global development. This is a framework that privileges commercial interests over commitments to provide universal entitlements to address fundamental life-sustaining needs. Political struggles over development will continue against the ideology of the SDG project and for transformative shifts for actually sustainable development.     

Children,Poverty and the Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) came into force in January 2016, taking over from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Significant human development progress has occurred in recent decades. Nevertheless, the MDGs have been criticised not least for failing to prioritise inequality and gains for the poorest people. The SDGs create a much more comprehensive agenda and support many key child rights concerns. While SDGs reflect an important global consensus, their delivery depends upon national action.     

Changes in the association between social housing tenure and child outcomes across cohorts: comparing the millennium and British cohort studies

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, social housing in the UK has increasingly become the preserve of the poorest in society. This paper is the first to investigate how the child outcome penalties associated with social housing tenure have changed over time across UK cohorts. I compare the differences in the cognitive, mental health, and physical health outcomes of children in social housing with children in non-social housing and evaluate whether these tenure differences have changed between the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS) and the 2000 Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). I find that in both cohorts, children in social housing exhibit worse outcomes across all three dimensions (cognitive, mental health, and physical health) than children in non-social housing. For cognitive and physical health outcomes, however, the tenure difference has narrowed between the two cohorts, while for mental health outcomes, the tenure difference has widened. These results suggest that children have experienced a relative worsening in their mental health outcomes across cohorts, but also a relative improvement in both their cognitive and physical health outcomes. The findings suggest that policies aimed at reducing tenure inequalities in child outcomes should focus on mental health development in the early years.     

Flat Disc Phonographs and the Injunction of the Second Master

This article examines the mechanical phonograph from its invention as a business aid to its incorporation into the domestic space. While its insertion into the latter was certainly dependent on technical improvements, it was equally dependent upon soliciting the very fantasy space of the phonograph as an autonomous object capable of speaking on behalf of the individual. A central strategy to soliciting the domestic phonograph was to gradually remove its recording device, which simultaneously removed the consumer's ability to engage with it as an interactive device. I use this as grounds to argue that the phonograph initially evidenced a term developed by ?i?ek called primordial substitution. Eventually, however, the decision to remove the recording device was an unconscious necessity in order for the phonograph to contribute to fantasy coordinates of democracy.     

After the MDGs: From Social Development to Technoenterprise in Tanzania

Abstract

This article explores how a development paradigm changes in Tanzania as the social sector concerns of the Millennium Development Goal era are practically and politically superseded by a commitment to private sector-driven structural transformation. Changes in the content and orientation of development do not occur as a result of evaluating what kinds of interventions are effective. They are the outcome of concerted efforts of paradigm reconstruction in which the role of development knowledge is pivotal. The process of policy shift entails a reorganisation of the architectures established to support the previous aid regime, including altering the roles of development knowledge producers and civil society organisations. New political relations between business interests and development actors support the increased influence of philanthropic foundations in determining the development agenda, which is sustained by new configurations of development knowledge. These shifts have important political implications for the kinds of policies considered developmental and the extent to which development orthodoxies can be contested.