Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals ...

Markus Loewe
2 Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development
Goals
2.1 Historical background and genesis of the Millennium
Declaration
The Millennium Summit is the outcome of a development that entailed an
at least partial departure from the so-called Washington Consensus, which
dominated the international debate during the 1980s and rested squarely on
neoliberal economic theory (Gsänger 1996a; Eberlei 2000). It found expression
above all in the stabilization and structural adjustment programs
(SAPs) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that
provided for consolidation of the current accounts and budgets of indebted
developing countries, continuous and noninterventionist monetary and fiscal
policies, and structural market reforms (market opening, deregulation,
and privatization). Poverty reduction was largely equated with higher economic
growth, the assumption being that such growth would, sooner or
later, benefit the poor through trickle-down effects (Decker 2003, 488).
In the early 1990s, however, it gradually become apparent that this assumption
was, at least in its then current form, not tenable. Indeed, in
many developing countries – above all in Africa, but also in Latin America –
poverty had even worsened under the SAPs (Decker 2003, 488; Betz 2003,
456). As early as the mid-1980s UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, voiced
criticism of the high costs exacted by the SAPs and called for “adjustment
programs with a human countenance.” This demand was underpinned programmatically
by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP),
which, in 1990, released its first Human Development Report (HDR), a
counter piece to the World Bank’s World Development Report. The HDR
argued that economic growth did by no means automatically come along
with social development (e.g. on education and health indicators) (UNDP
2000). The report further noted critically that the development debate was
largely dominated by a one-dimensional, purely economic understanding
of poverty. Based on the capabilities approach pioneered mainly by Amartya
Sen (Sen 1981; Sen 1999), poverty was now defined as multiple deprivation
of capabilities, i.e. as a lack of means that are needed to carry out
the activities one cherishes and to live a life of self-determination (Lipton /
Ravallion 1995).
26 German Development Institute