This week (September 25th), the UN General Assembly will hold a Special Event on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Alongside exhortations regarding the last two years of the current set of goals, the draft outcome document of the event calls for "a single framework and set of Goals" for the post-2015 development agenda. The document suggests the new goals should cover both poverty eradication and sustainable development and should be "universal in nature and applicable in all countries, while taking account of differing national circumstances." I hope that language stays in the final draft (see here for why). But if we're going to have a single set of sustainable development goals applicable in all countries, it seems like a great time to be thinking about Millennium Development Ideals: laying out the minimum level of quality of life to which we practically aspire for everyone on the planet.
While the current MDGs lay out the battle against absolute poverty and deprivation, no one would suggest achieving them would mean we'd reached an acceptable minimum level of quality of life for all. Take the first goal: let's hope we rid the world of $1.25 a day poverty. But even if we do, no one would call $1.26 a day adequate for a high quality of life. Millennium Development Ideals would attempt to frame and (preferably) put numbers to the outcomes that would be considered minimally adequate to achieve a high quality of life anywhere in the world. As it might be: making it over the US poverty line of around $13 per person per day; or universal access to clean hot and cold running water in the household. The ideals wouldn't be targets with an end-date -it is simply preposterous to imagine we could achieve them by 2030. But they'd say where we're hoping ...
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