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

Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals
Even though this certainly is due at least in part to the end of the bipolar
international system, it also has to do with the dissemination of new information
and communications technologies, the ongoing process of globalization,
and the sense for networked thinking that the latter development
has entailed: In many countries a consciousness had matured that numerous
socioeconomic, ecological, and human rights problems are not accessible
to national solutions and are in need of international arrangements,
and that these problems are marked by a high level of interdependence.
One reflection of this is the fact that the declarations and agreements
adopted at the world summits take a holistic view of global problems and
underline the causal links between them (Gsänger 1996b; Martens 2005;
Satterthwaite 2004, 8).
At the end of the decade, there was a large measure of consensus on numerous
development-related issues, and it was this that paved the way for
the adoption of the Millennium Declaration. In particular, the conferences
served to establish a broad consensus on a common goal system as well as
on strategic approaches for translating it into practice.
It should be borne in mind here that this goal system is nothing fully new;
indeed, it very largely reflects the goals that led, in 1945, to the foundation
of the United Nations and that are laid out in the UN Charter. However,
the multidimensional goal system of the new development paradigm contrasts
in many respects with the one-sided focus of 1980s development
policy on economic target dimensions (economic growth, income, containment
of inflation). The new consensus was soon to find support among
a broad alliance of actors: the UN system, the OECD, and, finally, the IMF
and the World Bank.
In 1996, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC)
released its report “Shaping the 21 st Century: The Contribution of Development
Co-operation” (Clemens / Kenny / Moss 2004, 5). In it, the DAC
took up the central goals defined by the earlier world conferences and proposed
a global development partnership geared to achieving these “ambitious
but realisable goals” (OECD/DAC 1996, 2) by the year 2015. These
German Development Institute 29