Post 2015: Ownership in All the Wrong Places

From globaldevelopment Mon Apr 28 2014, 20:44:41

With the Sustainable Development Goals Working Group busy in New York trying to whittle down its areas of interest into a plausible list of targets, two issues of 'goal ownership' have come to the fore. First, everyone seems very keen the goals should be universal but 'country-owned' - this is the excuse for all of the Xs in the High Level Panel Report ("Cover X% of people who are poor and vulnerable with social protection systems," for example). Such Xs should be decided at the country level, they suggest.

But second, there's a G-77 push for 'partnership targets' in each goal area - a stalking horse for 12 (or 14 - however many goals we end up with) costing and funding targets. Their statement to the SDG Working Group in New York argues "each SDG should be linked with the strengthened global partnership for development with an effective means of implementation. The notion of 'means of implementation' consists of, among others, a mix of financial resources, technology development and transfer, as well as capacity-building."

This is a case of ownership in all of the wrong places. The country ownership mantra for development targets gets wrong where the power of the global goals as a device for leverage comes from, and the partnership targets get wrong where ownership of financial flows should be.

The idea of 'leading with national targets, with global targets to follow' ignores the major value of the MDGs: at one point in time at least, they represented the consensus view of all of the world's leaders on where and what development progress we wanted to see. That consensus was what gave them legitimacy. National efforts led by whoever happens to be in the executive at the time lack similar consensus legitimacy at the country level. They look like a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper-lite. Does the world need more PRSPs? And trying to add up ...

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