Half-way to what?

Thinking back one or two years, who would have predicted the current turmoil in global markets for finance, food and fuel? Thinking back further, who would have imagined the spread of the Internet, the collapse of the Soviet block or the post-9/11 world?

So what are our chances of predicting the world in 2015? Not great but we can say something. The current pace of global change is accelerating and creating both challenges and opportunities. There are some major global and regional transformative processes and emerging issues the character of which is marked above all by increased inter-dependence between the North and South and East and West.

Commentators have noted the tendency of these to destabilize existing livelihoods, unravel social fabrics, create conflict and exclusion as well as disrupt international markets. These processes are also reinforcing the diversity in what was once the ‘Third World’: at one end of the spectrum there is a group of accelerated developers in the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the BRICETS (Eastern Europe and Turkey) and the Goldmans Sachs N11 (the next countries expected to experience fast economic growth). At the other end of the spectrum there are the 50-60 countries termed LICUS (Low Income Country Under Stress) that might be classified as ‘fragile states’.

Distinctions between developed and developing worlds are also changing — China is forecast to have overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2015, with India not far behind. Parts of Glasgow have lower life expectancies than Sub-Saharan Africa. Four of the world’s richest billionaires are Indian. Many policy issues are common to countries at different levels of economic or social development.

This increased global interconnectedness is expressing itself in a growing variety of ways such as volatility in global markets (especially food, fuel and credit), climate change, natural resources, technology (notably ICTs and industrial bio-fuels) and terrorism and security. The net outcome of these is rapid and widespread change to lifestyles and livelihoods and potentially an increase in conflict over resources and large-scale national and international migratory movements.

The MDGs have played a major role in focusing policy since their original incarnation in the 1990s and some bilateral agencies, notably the UK’s Department for International Development, have gone as far as to judge the value of all their activities on the contribution to achieving the MDGs. What happens when we no longer have the MDGs? What will guide policy after 2015?

Development policy is already reconfiguring. We have major new donors — most notably China and the new non-state actors such as the Gates Foundation; new contexts and institutions — a new aid architecture, decentralisation, terrorism legislation; newly emerging policy narratives — the resurgence of economic growth as key to development and the more nuanced agendas of citizenship participation. Such changes may determine whether or not policy processes emerge in favour of the poor and marginalised.

So, how can we promote pro-poor policy after the MDGs and amid all these complex changes, some of which mediate in favour of the poor and many of which may not? Here are four options:

1. We could carry forward the same MDGs without a timeline. This would overcome the distorting effects of targets such as children in school but with few books, teachers and sometimes not enough buildings. Yet the timeline has been a rallying call.

2. We could take the same MDG targets but with a new timeline. Jeffery Sachs has argued for 2025 and others for 2020. However, will another five to ten years be enough to make progress?

3. We could have new or different kinds of targets with or without a timeline. For example, the aid effectiveness agenda is based on process targets rather than outcome targets: it calls for nationally ‘owned’ development strategies building on the poverty reduction strategy process. This might better suit the current policy architecture and would entail much greater opening of development policy to non-state actors. These non-state actors could participate in the formation of a national strategy leading to genuinely national development goals rather than a state dominated approach that subverts accountability.

4. We might have new or different kinds of targets that go beyond the ‘traditional’ lens of material consumption/deprivation. Wellbeing is emerging as a complement — and even perhaps an alternative — to the more traditional ways of thinking about and measuring poverty and deprivation. It extends attention from¡what people can do and be to how people feel about what they can do and be. It goes beyond the material to consider relationships and values, beliefs and behaviour.

Breaking the inter-generational transmission of poverty requires not only disrupting the transmission of material deprivation via public policy such as nutrition or education programmes and projects but also the creation of progressive norms and values in terms of relationships and behavioural norms via public policy campaigns that seek to influence how people think and behave — for example, campaigns on feeding and schooling girls for example.

This would suggest public policy would move beyond material provision — public expenditure, growth, etc. — into areas in which policy intervention is considered at best highly controversial: values, relationships, norms and behaviour. It is this line of thinking that underpins the recent popularity in behavioural economics books such as Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge.

In short, international development policy post-2015 is certain to be more global as we all become more connected by global markets, climate change, migration and information technology. It is also likely to be more complex and less predictable because of all these global changes — and the speed at which they are happening.

Society-owned strategies and goals will be needed to guide development policy as will continued reflection on the impact of global changes on the transmission of intergenerational poverty. And policy will need to take into account non-material deprivation, taking into account values, norms and behaviour.