27 February 2015: In a paper titled ‘Post 2015: A New Era of Accountability?,” Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, The New School, and Desmond McNeill, Centre for Development and Environment, University of Oslo, call for “a new approach” to accountability. They highlight the responsibility of international organizations and rule-making bodies such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), which have “a moral responsibility not to exacerbate poverty.” The paper was presented during a UN Statistics Division seminar on developing an indicator framework for the post-2015 development agenda, ahead of the 46th session of the UN Statistical Commission (UNSC 46).

In the paper, which was presented on 27 February 2015, Fukuda-Parr and McNeill discuss limitations of accountability mechanisms related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and argue that, as a metric to evaluate performance, MDGs are: biased against the poorest countries; unrealistic for the countries with the lowest starting points; and irrelevant for many countries where the targets have already been reached, or are close to it, leading them to be dubbed “Minimum Development Goals.”

The authors caution that while the SDGs will be an improvement over the MDGs, they are “overwhelmingly focused on the responsibility of national governments, and on outcomes at the national level,” and unlikely to be an important instrument for addressing structural and systemic factors that contribute to global poverty. They also argue that the logic of simplicity, concreteness and quantification of the goals “will tend to squeeze out issues like stabilizing financial markets and strengthening regulation for money laundering.” They stress the importance of a goal to reduce inequality, “not only within, but also between countries,” as well as a target on increasing developing countries’ voice in decision making.

On establishing a global goal for accountability, “based on the simple premise of global justice,” the authors propose using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which they say is simple and carries none of the problems and distortions of global goals. [Publication: Post-2015: A New Era of Accountability] [Seminar Webpage]