The document discusses the merits and flaws of using global goals like the MDGs and SDGs to set international development agendas. While the MDGs brought attention to issues like poverty reduction, they oversimplified complex problems and may have distorted policies by focusing on quantitative targets over qualitative progress. Global goals can also be influenced by political and economic factors rather than evidence-based priorities. The SDGs aim to address some of the MDGs' weaknesses by embracing a broader sustainable development framework, but their large number of targets and indicators risks overwhelming data collection capabilities. Overall, the document questions whether global goals are the best approach while acknowledging their communication power.

1. Are global goals a good way to
set international agendas?
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr
UNAM, Mexico City
14 November, 2017

2. The so called ‘success’ of the MDGs
• Drew attention, ‘one of the most resonant and unifying
agreements’ – a success for donors.
• No evidence that they made a difference – no
counterfactual
• Communication power: simple, quantitative, and
concrete.
• Strengths as weaknesses: simplification, reductionism
and reification of a complex process

3. Quantitative indicators
• Inherently reductionist
• knowledge effect – redefines concepts
• policy effect – monitoring benchmarks
become hard planning targets

4. MDGs in the marketplace of ideas
• Emergence of MDGs - a new strategy for
development aid amidst declining support
• The poverty narrative in the political economy
of development –
– off the table issues: employment and growth;
climate change; financial crises; industrial policy;
macroeconomic policies; structural
transformation; the state......
– a cover for neoliberal economic agenda?

5. Global goals and the power of
numbers
• Sociology of knowledge on the use of
indicators
• How indicators perverted human rights and
human development agendas
• Faulty metrics – how should success be
measured: achieving the target or accelerating
the pace of progress.

6. • Drifting targets amid scattered
arrows convey the message of
the book – misdirected,
misleading measures, and
country performance gauged
against a single target
regardless of the starting
point. Global goals are
seemingly scientific measures,
but the development process
is nonlinear and
unpredictable.
• MDGs: a Mostly Deficient
Measure.

7. SDGs
• A vehicle for new idea of development:
sustinable development
• Replaces competing idea: development as
ending absolute poverty

8. • SDGs – 17 goals, 169 targets, 232 indicators
– not simple;
– quantitative but also qualitative, straining data capacity
– concrete only in some areas
• Indicator framework:
– Data collection - overwhelming National Statistical Offices
capacity
– Data creation – ‘Tier III’ indicators overwhelming data
community capacity to develop new measurement tools