Introduction
The desire to boil the ungovernable complexity of the social world down to a series of manageable proxy-measures seems to be a ubiquitous feature of life in and around the modern state. In many cases the demand from state agencies for ever greater flows of data was initially linked to practices of war-making, with reliable information needed to guide the movement of standing armies and supplies, and the levying of taxes to fund these operations.Footnote 1 Over time, with the expanding reach of governing structures into other policy areas, the creation of data flows has proliferated. It is now standard practice for states to collate indicators on a wide range of demographic trends, forms of economic activity, the performance of education and healthcare systems, and many other areas.Footnote 2 And while the instruments of the modern state may have enjoyed something of a head start, international organisations are now working hard to reproduce this quantification of the social world on a global scale. Although transformations across other areas of global governance have been dramatic,Footnote 3 it is perhaps in the realm of development that benchmarking practices are at their most extensive.Footnote 4
Through this article, I focus on the Millennium Development Goal framework, which represents arguably the most prominent attempt to benchmark global development. The Millennium Development Goals were launched at the end of 2001, with an unprecedented number of heads of state signalling their support through a period of high-profile United Nations summitry. The performance of the international community as a whole through the early 2000s was, it was suggested, to be assessed by evaluating the extent to which the lot of its lowest income members was improved. The MDGs were introduced as a means of assessing the progress achieved in this regard. With its eight Goals and associated indicators and time-bound targets, the framework served to establish a multidimensional vision of poverty and poverty reduction for the twenty-first century. The MDG initiative has been the subject of much analysis through its fifteen-year lifespan, with a number of works emerging as the Goals’ 2015 census point is reached.Footnote 5 Here, I contribute to this literature by exploring the interactions that took place in and around a series of UN reviews of the MDGs.
Through an analysis of archival records and primary documents, I demonstrate that blame games have permeated these MDG-related processes. To conceptually unpack these blame games, I develop a typology that classifies the attribution of responsibility within benchmarking exercises that differentiates between their design and execution phases. In the case of the MDGs, the framework’s architects sought to produce an initiative that used diffuse lines of responsibility to limit the prevalence of blame games. Developing country governments’ low level of integration of the Goals into domestic policy frameworks served to maintain this opacity. However, UN review summits through 2008 and 2013 saw the emergence of prominent attempts to attribute blame for poor performance. A clear cleavage emerged between, on the one hand, representatives of developed states who laid primary responsibility for under-achievement on the MDGs at the door of developing countries’ institutional weaknesses, and, on the other, representatives of emerging and developing states who singled out insufficient flows of aid.Footnote 6 Through a process of strategic clarification, enhanced attention has been placed on these issues within the Sustainable Development Goal framework that is in the process of superceding the MDGs.Footnote 7 Overall, through the article, I address the under-examination of agent-level dynamics within the MDG-related literature,Footnote 8 and I offer initial reflections on the relationship between benchmarking and blame games to the emerging literature on the politics of global benchmarking.
In developing this line of analysis, the article proceeds through the following structure. In the opening section, I outline the scope of the conceptual and empirical contribution that is made through the article. I introduce the four-fold typology to clarify the intersection between benchmarking and blame games, and provide an overview of the primary analysis that underpins this contribution. Through the second section I provide a history of the Millennium Development Goals, outlining the capturing of the drafting process by a narrow group of UN technocrats, and their layering of diffuse lines of responsibility into the design of the MDG framework. In the third section, I review the content analysis of MDG summitry and associated policy framework documents, which uncovers the ongoing practices of blame shifting through UN fora. This dynamic has seen developed country representatives laying responsibility for poor performance at the door of corruption and low institutional capacity in developing countries, and developing countries identifying developed countries’ unmet aid commitments as the key factor inhibiting progress. Strategic clarification has come as the MDGs have evolved into the Sustainable Development Goals, whose relatively open and inclusive drafting process has led to the incorporation of more precisely delineated responsibilities into this follow-on system. Through the concluding section of the article, I provide a brief recapitulation of the article’s core themes and findings.
The exploration of blame games in the world of the MDGs that I provide in the next section focuses on state representatives’ engagements with the MDG framework that were manifest through the 2008 and 2013 UN review summits of the initiative, and through a series of post-MDG launch Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). This picture is, of course, partial; the network of relationships surrounding the MDG framework extended out beyond this selection of actors and arenas. International and domestic non-governmental organisations, in particular, remained closely hooked in to the framework, and contributed to the emergence of extended blame games that unfolded across multiple levels of governance.Footnote 9 While these extended blame games sit beyond the central scope of the article, they represent an important subject for future research. Indeed, given the ambitions of the SDG architects to use the post-2015 framework to push for enhanced domestic accountability processes as a means of improving developing-country government performance, these extended blame games look set to become increasingly important over time.
Benchmarking and blame shifting in global development
In the realm of global development, benchmarks come in many different shapes and sizes. In many quarters the GDP measure continues to reign supreme, and has come to be seen as an objective yardstick with which to assess the performance of developed and developing countries alike.Footnote 10 Through the mid-2000s, several prominent critical appraisals sought to extend the range of data captured by this narrowly-targeted indicator, with proposals to augment the GDP figure with additional measures pertaining to both environmental and social factors.Footnote 11 Beyond these economistically-centred frameworks, more self-consciously multidimensional frameworks have been crafted by agencies of various stripes. These frameworks have been created to try to ensure that the way in which we measure and promote development includes an explicit focus on education, health, and other measures of living standards. The initiatives that can be listed in this regard include the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index, the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, and, the focus of this article, the Millennium Development Goals.
In the paragraphs following I outline the extension offered by this article to both the emerging literature on the politics of global benchmarking, and the MDG-related literature. The former body of work offers many valuable insights, exploring both the constitutive and relational aspects of benchmarking interventions. By analysing the intersection between benchmarking and blame shifting, I in particular engage with works that focus on the relational dimension. Within the MDG-related literature, there is a tendency toward exploring the constitutive impact of the framework in a way that can obscure the role of agent-led contestation. By exploring the detail of agent interactions surrounding the MDGs, I rebalance the focus of these works. As is noted in the introduction to this Special Issue, benchmarks represent inescapably political interventions. Here, I draw on the roadmap provided by the editors of the Special Issue (André Broome and Joel Quirk) to outline the contribution from this work on the MDGs.
The first set of properties associated with benchmarking that are flagged up by Broome and Quirk serve to highlight the constitutive power of these systems. These properties relate to the reification of particular normative standards into observable and seemingly objective categorisations, and the commensuration of discrete units into a common evaluative metric.Footnote 12 By providing an authoritative ideal-type template that embodies a set of shorthand assumptions about how to understand and address a policy issue, the successful dissemination of a benchmark can serve to frame the way in which a community of relevant actors perceive significant aspects of their social and political environments. In existing literature, it is relatively common for benchmarking systems to be criticised for the blind spots they can create in their rises to dominance. By reproducing existing power relations, so critics argue, there is a tendency for benchmarking initiatives to crowd out the perspectives and interests of more marginalised agents.
Prominent contributions to feminist and critical accounting scholarship offer analyses that progress along these lines. Literature within this area has, for example, sought to highlight the systematic devaluation of social reproduction that has been locked in through the rise to dominance of the UN System of National Accounts (SNA) as the core point of reference shaping statistical agencies’ attempts to track economic activity. By excluding labour undertaken within the household from its sphere of calculation, the SNA has been said to marginalise forms of work predominantly undertaken by females in both the study of political economy and the practice of economic management.Footnote 13 In a similar vein, the Millennium Development Goals themselves have also been attacked for their totalising impact. The MDG framework has been criticised, inter alia, for embedding a neoliberal conceptualisation of development, and for rolling out a top-down, technocratic approach that leaves little space for substantive input from domestic populations.Footnote 14 Findings from this article go towards shedding some light on the constitutive side of the MDG process. In particular, by demonstrating that the integration of MDG indicators into domestic policy frameworks has remained modest, and that contestation of the Goals within reviews remains widespread, I demonstrate that the constitutive impact of the MDGs remains relatively limited in the examined fora. Discussion over the appropriateness of the Goals, and use of alternative measures of development, has continued to feature prominently. It is, however, toward the more relational elements of benchmarking interventions that the core engagement from this article is directed.
The second set of properties belonging to benchmarking systems that are flagged up by Broome and Quirk in their introduction to this Special Issue refer to the relational aspects of these structures. The relational impact of benchmarking comes with what the editors refer to as the closing of the recursive loop. Through benchmarking interventions, value rankings of an aspect of the social world are made, and the recursive loop is completed as benchmarked agents adjust their subsequent behaviour.Footnote 15 In its most simplified version, a hierarchical and unidirectional relationship can be seen to exist between the benchmarker, who designs the framework and operationalises the symbolic judgement, and the benchmarkee, who receives the judgement and responds accordingly. However, as is outlined elsewhere in the Special Issue and in the wider literature on the politics of global benchmarking, the relational aspects of benchmarking interventions can take the form of complex and iterative interactions.Footnote 16 Guided by the interactions observed through MDG review summits and associated processes, and drawing on insights from both the existing literature on blame games and on the politics of benchmarking, the article will present a framework for exploring the intersection of blame games and benchmarking interventions.Footnote 17
To gain analytic traction over the intersection of blame games and benchmarking interventions, it is useful to begin by exploring the issue of responsibility. Two distinct moments can be identified that shape the nature of the lines of responsibility that become embedded within benchmarking interventions. The first of these comes at the benchmarking design phase. At this phase, the intervention’s architects can opt to identify discrete agents with responsibility for the achievement of outcomes, agents who will be rewarded or sanctioned in line with benchmarked indicators. Conversely, these architects can design a benchmark with less direct lines of responsibility. In such cases, rather than being driven by the application of direct material or normative sanctions, any subsequent behavioural change will result from more diffuse shifts in beliefs about appropriate standards.Footnote 18 The second of these moments comes through the implementation phase. By virtue of their socially negotiated nature, lines of responsibility in the world of benchmarking retain a fluidity that outlasts their initially designated structure. As is comprehensively catalogued in the work of Christopher Hood and others,Footnote 19 many strategies are available to agents with which to either associate or dissociate themselves from a particular benchmarking exercise.Footnote 20 Through the implementation phase, lines of responsibility can be either clarified or blurred.
Given the existence of these two potential starting points and two potential processes of evolution, a four-part matrix can be created to capture the intersection between blame games and benchmarking processes. This typology is presented in Figure 1. I will briefly discuss dynamics associated with each mode, paying particular attention to benchmarking interventions in the field of development.
Responsibility in global benchmarking
The inclusion of direct responsibilities within benchmarking interventions can be expected where asymmetric relationships exist between benchmarker and benchmarkee that enable the former to lock in their preferences against the contrasting preferences of the latter, or where there is a sufficient level of consensus amongst relevant parties. The asymmetric version of this mode coheres closely with practices associated with the new public management agenda; by collating and publishing a range of performance-related data, benchmarking systems are structured so as to encourage the assessed units to ‘up their game’.Footnote 21 The increasing application of this mode of benchmarking in the realm of development is particularly associated with the rise to dominance of neoliberal practices through the 1980s.Footnote 22 In such cases, even if the benchmarkee disputes the legitimacy of the framework content or application, they will nonetheless receive material or normative sanctions in the case of under-performance. In order for this mode to be achieved through benchmarking interventions that bring together more equal partners, it is necessary for all parties to continue to ‘buy in’ to the framework through its execution. Where direct lines of responsibility are layered in to the framework at the moment of design and maintained through the process of execution, the benchmarking intervention overall can be characterised as one of ‘direct responsibility’.
From the same starting point of direct responsibility by design, an alternative mode can be reached through more dynamic patterns of interaction between the agents brought together by a benchmarking intervention. Where evaluations flag up poor performance, blame games can kick in to play as benchmarkees work to evade material sanctions and preserve reputation. While sanctions and reputational loss can be hard to avoid,Footnote 23 the invocation of mitigating factors can be used to minimise these costs by laying responsibility for sub-optimal outcomes with exogenous events.Footnote 24 In addition, third party actors can be used by the benchmarkee in blame avoidance techniques. In the realm of development, the International Monetary Fund in particular is often singled out as being responsible for perceived performance failures in national economies operating under its loan arrangements.Footnote 25 Where direct lines of responsibility are layered in at the moment of design and successfully challenged through the process of execution, the benchmarking intervention overall can be characterised as one of ‘strategic blurring’.
Turning now to the modes in which the starting point for the benchmarking intervention was one of diffuse lines of responsibility, the relationships surrounding the Millennium Development Goals as explored in the article will provide useful exemplars. Diffuse lines of responsibility may be layered in to a benchmarking intervention where the architects are located on the margins of a given policy area and so are unable to control the flow of normative and material sanctions, or where there is a low level of consensus over the identity of the actors with the predominant capability to shape the benchmarked outcome. In the case of the MDGs, a combination of these two factors shaped the incorporation of diffuse lines of responsibility in to the benchmarking system. In addition to fearing that the creation of direct responsibilities on state actors might reduce their willingness to sign up to the scheme, the MDG architects were working in a context in which beliefs over the actors and factors influencing development outcomes remain heavily contested.Footnote 26 As such, the location of responsibility for the achievement of MDG-related indicators remained underspecified. Outcomes in the realms of education, health, sanitation, and the environment were diffused across the ‘international community’. In the realm of overseas development aid, the one area where a relatively precise group of relevant actors can be seen to exist, responsibility was diffused through the creation of an imprecisely specified target.Footnote 27
From this starting point, an overall mode of ‘diffuse responsibility’ will be achieved if there is an overall pattern of stability in the relationship between actors brought together by the intervention. Through the lifetime of the MDGs, prominent dynamics served to create such institutional inertia. As is analysed in the article, by largely eschewing MDG targets and indicators within their national development strategies, developing country governments were able to avoid establishing a more direct line of responsibility for these benchmarked outcomes. However, additional interactions that occurred within and around the UN review summits served to generate a momentum that, in fact, was followed by an overall pattern of ‘strategic clarification’ as the MDGs were superseded by the Sustainable Development Goals.
Strategic clarification in benchmarking systems can be driven by both pull- and push-related factors. With the former, the emergent benchmarkee works to clarify their line of responsibility to the benchmarked indicator; with the latter, third party actors work to identify the benchmarkee to whom a clarified line of responsibility is to be attached. Actors’ desire to secure reputational enhancement constitutes a significant pull-related factor. Where a benchmarked indicator begins to signal signs of success, actors may attempt to take ownership of positive performance.Footnote 28 Actors’ desire to compel others into behavioural change constitutes a significant push-related factor. By establishing a clearer relationship between an actor and a benchmarked indicator that is signalling a sign of failure, normative and material sanctions can be deployed to catalyse change in the emergent benchmarkee.Footnote 29
With the MDGs, it is through these push-related dynamics that strategic clarification has over time become layered in to the framework. In particular, throughout the MDG review summits that have been analysed, consistent calls were voiced for clearer lines of responsibility to be drawn to two additional components of the benchmarking system. On the one hand, a significant proportion of developing country representatives made calls to layer in a more precise overseas development assistance target into the framework, to be met by their developed country counterparts; on the other, many developed country representatives made calls to layer in more precise targets in relation to domestic institutional reform and anti-corruption measures, with responsibility tied to their developing country counterparts. While these elements remained excluded from the content of the MDG framework, they have become incorporated into the expanded set of Sustainable Development Goals that have recently superseded the 2001–15 initiative. By adopting an extended view that considers the MDG framework and its transition into the SDGs, and noting that the push towards the creation of more direct lines of responsibility emerged in the examined UN review summits, through this article I suggest that the MDG benchmarking intervention can be characterised as following the mode of strategic clarification.
The empirical material contained here comes from an analysis of the archival records connected to UN summitry on the Millennium Development Goals, and of a series of national development plans. The archival records drawn upon come from the repository of speeches delivered at two major Millennium Development Goal progress reviews, held at the United Nations headquarters in September 2008 and September 2013. In total, 86 contributions were analysed.Footnote 30 In addition to evaluating the level of support displayed for the benchmarking system overall and its component parts, I have also recorded whether clear calls for refocusing or extending the initiative were delivered. Where such a call was issued, the primary reform being advocated was recorded.Footnote 31 The national development plans analysed consisted of a randomly selected sample of one-third of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers published by low income countries by the close of 2013.Footnote 32 Given that UN documentation surrounding the launch of the MDG framework suggested that PRSPs be used by developing countries to outline their pathways towards meeting the framework’s targets and indicators, this represents an appropriate location at which to further probe the presence or absence of strategic clarification through the lifetime of the benchmarking initiative.Footnote 33 The finding that the extent of engagement with MDG indicators within PRSPs remains limited serves to confirm and extend the conclusions offered by Fukuda-Parr’s evaluation.Footnote 34 Overall, by demonstrating that sustained contestation within review summits has been followed by strategic clarification through the SDGs, new light is shed on the intersection between blame games and this most prominent of benchmarking initiatives.
The empirical analysis presented in the sections following provides an overview of the blame games involving state representatives in the world of the Millennium Development Goals. The terrain of blame games and the MDGs stretches out beyond these parameters, to other actors and to other levels of governance. In domestic political constellations across many developing countries, local and national actors have attempted to tie blame to governing authorities for perceived underperformance in relation to particular Goals. Indeed, it has been suggested by Bergh et al. that ‘a large part of the MDG success story seems to be the role played by domestic politics’,Footnote 35 with progress having been catalysed when non-governmental organisations and others have helped generate such strategic clarification. While acknowledging the importance of these additional sites of contestation and recognising the need for further study of the intersection of blame games and benchmarking through these networks, the sections following review the dynamics as manifest in the key UN review summits and the surrounding PRSP policy documentation.
The MDGs and diffuse responsibility by design
Authorship processes matter in the world of global governance. Strategically important actors can go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that documentation providing an institutionally endorsed perspective coheres with their own preferences and ideas.Footnote 36 Here, I explore the impact of the writing process behind the formation of the Millennium Development Goals on the designation of responsibility for the performance indicators within the framework. The drafting of the MDGs was a highly atypical production process at the United Nations. UN reports are often the product of extended drafting processes, through which a wide range of interested parties are provided with an opportunity to review and suggest amendments to a given text. This writing by committee can lead to the production of balanced documents whose contents are widely approved, but which lack a clear ‘take home message’.Footnote 37 In contrast, the tightly controlled process surrounding the MDG initiative saw direct input limited to a small circle. In crafting a framework capable of generating rapid endorsement from across the whole body of UN membership, the content laid down by the MDG authors was designed to exclude clear lines of responsibility for the achievement of particular development related outcomes. By design, the MDG framework was a benchmarking intervention with diffuse lines of responsibility.
It was on 18 September 2000 that the 189 member states of the United Nations adopted the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration was the core outcome of the Millennium Summit earlier that month, at which the largest gathering of world leaders in history had articulated their collective commitment to the values and principles of the United Nations. The Summit had been called by the General Assembly to ‘provide an opportunity to strengthen the role of the UN in meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century’.Footnote 38 In keeping with the unprecedented scale and extremely high profile of the event, the text of the Declaration established an ambitious vision.Footnote 39 The agenda that was laid out was broad ranging, detailing hopes for progress in issue areas including reform of the UN, peace and security, and poverty reduction. It was around 18 months after the adoption of the Declaration that the Millennium Development Goals were unveiled as the vehicle through which these development commitments would be operationalised.
To understand the emergence of the Millennium Development Goal framework, it is necessary to switch venues from the United Nations to the OECD.Footnote 40 The OECD was established in 1960, and throughout the Cold War functioned as something as a ‘think tank of the West’. Throughout the 1990s, following the close of the ideological standoff between the US and USSR, the OECD’s leadership sought to enhance the policy relevance of its work programmes as a means of securing the institution’s future role.Footnote 41 It is in this context that the OECD extension of its engagement with issues surrounding aid and development occurred. As part of its efforts to improve the effectiveness of bilateral assistance and the level of harmonisation amongst donor states, the OECD had in the late 1990s established a series of International Development Goals on which to focus their efforts. In 1999, the profile of the International Development Goal benchmarking system was significantly increased when the OECD joined with the European Commission, IMF, UN, and World Bank to conduct a progress review. In June 2000, as final preparations for the Millennium Summit were underway, the collaborative report on A Better World For All was published. The structure and content of the International Development Goals would, in due course, come to form the basis of the MDGs.
The transfer of these ideas from the OECD-led initiative into the MDGs was facilitated by the contracting in of actors involved with the former into the process surrounding the drafting of the latter. Once the initial green light had been provided by through the Millennium Summit, the task of transforming a somewhat amorphous Declaration into an actionable benchmarking system was taken up by a handful of individuals in UNDP and the United Nations Secretary General’s Office (UNSGO). Under the leadership of Mark Malloch-Brown of UNDP and Michael Doyle of UNSGO, staff from across the OECD, UN, and World Bank were brought together to form a small MDG committee. All members of the committee had been involved in the A Better World For All publication, and the preliminary version of the Millennium Development Goals was framed around the same seven pillars that had provided structure to the earlier iteration. Through the process an eighth goal, relating to the formation of a global partnership to foster development, was layered in to the benchmarking system.
The Millennium Development Goals were presented to the UN General Assembly in December 2001, where the benchmarking system was ‘noted’ without objection from the floor.Footnote 42 The MDG system is made up of three interlinked levels. At the broadest level are the Goals. Each Goal has between one and six targets, which in turn are monitored by between one and four indicators. In total, the MDG framework includes eight Goals, 21 targets, and 60 indicators. The eight Goals at the heart of the framework outline a commitment to: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability, and; establish a global partnership for development.
In line with their differing professional affiliations, the team involved in drafting the Millennium Development Goal framework had consciously aimed to create a benchmark around which a wide range of agencies could coordinate their activities. Drawing in major international organisations and leaders of developed and developing countries alike, the MDGs were designed as a tool to ‘express the resolve of the world’s political leaders to … make the right to development a reality for everyone’.Footnote 43 In order to minimise the possibility of any constituent group wishing to dissociate themselves from the framework or stall its progress through the UN General Assembly, the drafting team structured the framework in such a manner as to avoid directly apportioning responsibility for the achievement of individual elements on particular actors. Goals One to Seven were linked to precisely defined targets and indicators, but responsibility for the ultimate achievement of these outcomes was placed rather diffusely at the door of all members of the international system. Goal Eight specifically aimed to encourage developed countries to adjust their aid, trade, and other externally oriented policies so as to foster a more development enhancing environment; however, unlike the earlier elements of the framework, no quantitative metrics were tied to this aspect. The MDG authors were particularly wary of including the 0.7 per cent of GDP aid target, for fear of alienating in particular the US and Japanese leadership from the initiative.Footnote 44
Driven by this imminent conflict-avoiding dynamic, responsibility for the achievements of the development outcomes being monitored by the Millennium Development Goal framework was diffused across a wide range of actors. With no direct mechanisms in place to hook material resources or normative suasion to the achievement of the Goals, the framework lacked the necessary foundations through which to compel good performance through the exercise of precisely targeted sanctions.Footnote 45 As is outlined in the next section, this lack of focus on the discrete responsibilities of identified agents would come to be criticised through subsequent reviews of the Millennium Development Goal framework. It is to the evaluation of these dynamics that I now turn. Initially, disengagement from the MDGs within national development strategies served to reproduce the diffuse lines of responsibility that had been embedded at the design phase. Through the 2008 and 2013 review summits the foundations of strategic clarification began to be laid; foundations that, in due course, would come to be incorporated into the successor Sustainable Development Goals framework.
The MDGs and the emergence of strategic clarification
The context into which the Millennium Development Goal initiative was born did not augur well for the success of the benchmarking intervention. The immediate aftermath of the launch of the MDG framework was a turbulent time across the UN system, with the schism created by the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent investigation into corruption within the ‘oil for food’ programme creating significant reputational damage.Footnote 46 The legitimacy of the MDG framework itself was also initially challenged by actors dissatisfied with the closed nature of the drafting process through which the initiative was created,Footnote 47 although over time the Goals did come to attract a high degree of support from across the international development policymaking community. As is detailed later in the article, initially the lines of responsibility surrounding the framework remained diffuse, with developing country governments by and large eschewing MDG targets and indicators from their Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. However, through the MDG review summits of 2008 and 2013, the beginnings of a push toward strategic clarification began to emerge. Through the successor Sustainable Development Goals, this process of strategic clarification has been consolidated.
Within the 12 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers that were reviewed, all contained a broad commitment to the framework. These national development plans are variously presented as aiming towards ‘freeing our people from poverty and achieving the targeted MDGs’,Footnote 48 achieving ‘poverty reduction linked to the MDGs’,Footnote 49 and creating the structural foundations whose establishment ‘are directly linked to the achievement of the MDGs’.Footnote 50 However, the extensity with which the MDG framework was used to frame national development plans varied significantly. At one end of the scale, in their development plan the Cambodian government consciously and directly mirrored the MDG framework. Indeed, focusing as it did on achieving the Cambodian Millennium Development Goals, the ends of development included in this Paper borrowed their title and core content from the UN framework.Footnote 51 At the other end, in several development plans the MDG framework remaining a marginal feature, attracting just one or two brief mentions.
Further insights into the lines of responsibility between developing country governments and MDGs can be gained by exploring the detail of the engagement with individual targets and indicators in PRSPs. In keeping with the prominence of its discursive commitment, the Cambodian government leads the field in outlining a commitment to address 27 of the individual indicators from the MDG framework.Footnote 52 These indicators are drawn from across the spectrum of the MDGs, with aspects of Goals One to Seven all represented. Other instances of a relatively high level of correspondence between the content of the MDG benchmarking system and individual national plans come with the Tajik and Bangladeshi PRSPs, through which 14 and 13 indicators have been incorporated respectively. At the other end of the scale, while the Liberian PRSP did contain a discursive commitment to ‘progressing toward the Millennium Development Goals’,Footnote 53 no individual MDG indicators were included in the core focus of the Paper. The core focus of the Burundian, Kenyan, and Ugandan Papers included just one of the MDG indicators, coming in the form of the measures of the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, primary school enrolment, and the proportion of the population living on US $1 per day respectively.
Beneath this pattern of individual variation, common features of the PRSPs can be discerned that highlight where MDG indicators have – and have not – been integrated into national conceptualisations of the appropriate ends of development. The US $1 per day poverty benchmark was already a prominent feature of the development landscape by the launch of the MDG framework,Footnote 54 and as such it is perhaps unsurprising that this element was the most widely drawn upon within Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (see Figure 2). Three-quarters of the Papers included this indicator as a core end to be achieved in national development programmes. Beyond this central marker for the first Millennium Development Goal, key measures from Goal Two regarding primary school completion, Goal Six regarding HIV prevalence, and Goal Seven regarding access to improved water and sanitation were present in the core aims of two-thirds of the Papers.Source: Author’s analysis of PRSP content.
Most commonly appearing MDG indicators in PRSPs
The establishment of clear lines of responsibility between developing country government and MDG indicator was, however, the exception rather than rule in the examined PRSPs. Beyond the five mentioned in Figure 1, none of the other sixty indicators from the MDG benchmarking system appeared in over half of the papers examined. In total, one quarter of the sixty failed to make it into any of the core aims of these PRSPs. Goal Five, which focuses on maternal health, remained the most overlooked.Footnote 55 Amongst the component indicators, measures relating to adolescent motherhood and unmet family planning requirements remained entirely absent, while indicators on births attended by a professional, the prevalence of contraceptive use, and antenatal visits appeared only in the Cambodian Paper. Goal Seven, which focuses on environmental sustainability, remained the second most overlooked.Footnote 56 Indicators relating to the proportion of land mass covered by forest and the proportion of terrestrial and marine areas under official protection featured in just two Papers each. In addition, six indicators associated with Goal Seven remained entirely absent. Included amongst these were the measures of CO2 emissions, consumption of ozone-depleting materials, and total water use.
Given that one-quarter of MDG indicators failed to feature at all in the reviewed PRSPs, and that the average prevalence rate was just 16 per cent,Footnote 57 it can be seen that by and large developing country governments remained disengaged from the benchmarking system through these documents. In the main, direct lines of responsibility between governments and Goals failed to emerge within PRSPs. Through the UN review summits of the MDGs, the dominant pattern of engagement from participants was to display a combination of effusive support for the framework in general terms, while raising points of contestation in relation to particular points of detail. It is through the latter that evidence of a push toward strategic clarification of the benchmarking system can begin to be seen, with developed and developing country representatives working to lay blame for under performance at each other’s door.
At both the 2008 and 2013 events, virtually all participants presented strong praise for the MDG framework in their delivered statements. Examples include the following:
At the dawn of the new millennium … the Millennium Declaration was signed that provides a bold vision that … provides a crucial point of reference for measuring progress towards the establishment of a new world order that would be more equitable.Footnote 58
The Millennium Development Goals were not a mere declaration. They are expressions of our common humanity, our common vision for a better world.Footnote 59
At the beginning of the new millennium, our leaders came together … to express our shared commitment to reduce poverty and promote a more secure and prosperous world. The Millennium Development Goals express these shared commitments.Footnote 60
However, underlying this superficial acceptance of the MDG framework as constituting a compelling vision for international development in the twenty-first century, significant discontent was displayed regarding the detail of the benchmarking system.
In total, around 85 per cent of the representations delivered at the UN review summits contained clear injunctions to extend the MDG framework.Footnote 61 Underlying these calls was a shared assumption that a higher degree of specificity was required in relation to the lines of responsibility surrounding the achievement of the benchmarked MDG outcomes. Overwhelmingly, developed country representatives shifted blame toward the high levels of corruption and poor institutional performance in developing countries, while developing country governments shifted blame toward the unwillingness of developed country counterparts to live up to aid commitments.
The most commonly raised area for enhanced attention within the MDG framework related to the responsibility of developed country representatives to deliver appropriate volumes of aid flows. Discussions of Official Development Assistance (ODA) have an established lineage in UN forums; it was within the UN Conference on Trade and Development that, in the late 1960s, the much cited 0.7 per cent of GDP first emerged and gained traction.Footnote 62 The exclusion of this target from the MDG benchmarking system generated notable discontent. In total, this was the primary criticism offered by around one-third of participants at the 2008 and 2013 events. Through these contributions, inadequate levels of funding were highlighted as the core impediment to the more effective achievement of the ends of development as outlined in the MDG framework. The following calls are broadly representative:
All studies on the attainment of the MDGs have identified lack of finances as the main imperative … The imperative to reach the goal of 0.7 percent of Gross National Income on an urgent basis cannot be overstated.Footnote 63
Inadequate financing … limits our capacity to implement MDG initiatives.Footnote 64
[Poverty reduction] will remain elusive if the cooperating partners do not play their part and fulfil their role. It is sad to note that net official development assistance dropped by 4.7 percent in 2006 and a further 8.4 percent in 2007. Only five countries met or exceeded the 0.7 percent target.Footnote 65
Amongst advocates of this extension, failures to reach the 0.7 per cent figure were commonly alluded to, and the fact that this target remained absent from the plethora of indicators within the benchmarking system attracted critical comment.Footnote 66 No OECD members were amongst the supporters of the extension of the MDG framework’s focus on this issue.Footnote 67
Where OECD country representatives at the UN review summits did advocate extension of the benchmarking system, their focus was firmly directed towards foregrounding the responsibilities of developing country governments in fostering effective progress. Attention on the role of domestic institutions in fostering development was relatively well established by the time of the launch of the MDGs, most notably at the World Bank.Footnote 68 At the UN events, strong advocacy for enhancing the focus on domestic institutional reform came from many representatives of developed country governments. Around half of the OECD representatives highlighted this issue as the key intervening variable in shaping successful outcomes. Comments from the US, Poland, and Sweden respectively capture the flavour of these injunctions:
Governance is the factor that best explains the performance of African countries … The fight against corruption and entrenched interests remains a challenge in many places.Footnote 69
It is of utmost importance that the community of recipients live up to the rules of good governance, and assumes responsibility for the initiatives designed to achieve the MDGs.Footnote 70
We need democratic, effective, and accountable public institutions. We cannot fight poverty without fighting corruption … Corruption undermines growth and prosperity, and an effective state and stable society. We … have a responsibility to fight corruption, and we should make a special effort in the coming 800 days [leading to the MDG census point].Footnote 71
From amongst the non-OECD members, the Rwandan representative was the sole representative to strongly endorse the call for a greater focus on domestic governance reform.Footnote 72
As the MDGs drew towards their 2015 final census point, discussions over the form to be taken by their replacement became increasingly focused. It is through the creation of these Sustainable Development Goals that the process of strategic clarification, evident in the UN review summits outlined previously, was consolidated. In a marked contrast to the MDGs, the authorship process leading up to the launch of the SDGs has involved consultations with a wide range of state and non-state actors. As attempts to shape the SDGs reached their peak through a series of thematic workshops in late 2013 and early 2014, it was in fact suggested that ‘a whole industry is now in gear to construct the global goals’.Footnote 73 Led by a thirty-member Open Working Group,Footnote 74 13 sessions were held between March 2013 and July 2014 to populate a 17-Goal template that had been generated through the earlier Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. The outcome from this process, which was released in July 2014, lists over 160 targets and indicators to be met by census points in 2020 and 2030.Footnote 75 Through the inclusion of more precisely specified obligations, the SDG framework is serving to enact a strategic clarification of the lines of responsibility surrounding the UN-centred global development benchmark (see Figure 1).
The disputes that were evident in the MDG review processes between developed and developing states over the lines of responsibility surrounding global poverty reduction have carried over into the Open Working Group discussions of SDG content. In the Open Working Group, discussions that sought to clarify and quantify the ‘global partnership’ needed to support development progress, while many of the contributions from developing countries pressed for the inclusion of the 0.7 per cent target, no support was forthcoming from developed country representatives.Footnote 76 In a similar vein, through the discussions of the role of good governance and the rule of law in fostering development developed country support was counterbalanced by developing country resistance.Footnote 77 Whereas in the case of the MDGs the tightly controlled drafting process led to the creation of a framework lacking clearly delineated lines of responsibility, the more open SDG drafting process has culminated in a markedly different endpoint. Covering the theme of global partnership, SDG 17 includes a direct call to developing countries to ‘fully implement their commitments to provide 0.7 per cent GDP to developing countries’; covering the theme of accountable and inclusive institutions, SDG 16 calls for developing countries to ‘substantially reduce corruption and bribery … and develop transparent institutions’.Footnote 78
Viewed holistically, the interactions that have occurred within and around MDG review summits have, over time, created a push towards a strategic clarification of the benchmarking system. The diffuse lines of responsibility layered in to the benchmarking intervention by its architects were initially reinforced by developing country governments, through their low level of engagement with the Goals in national development strategies. However, with the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals, the pushes that emerged for more clearly delineated responsibilities on overseas development assistance and governance reform have recently been incorporated into the follow-on version of this most prominent of benchmarking initiatives.
Conclusion
Benchmarking is widely acknowledged to be an inherently political form of intervention. Having gained a high degree of prominence across the community of international development practitioners and scholars since their launch in 2001, the Millennium Development Goal benchmarking initiative has over the years attracted much comment and analysis. In the lead up to the final census year of 2015, this level of attention has increased further. Through this article, I have contributed to this MDG-related literature by presenting an empirically-focused exploration of agent-level dynamics surrounding the initiative. The insights generated through the paper are founded on new analysis of archival material from UN reviews of the MDGs undertaken in 2008 and 2013, and of the content of a series of national development plans as presented in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.
Through my analysis of this material, I outlined the existence of prominent blame games around the Millennium Development Goals. To explore this intersection between blame games and benchmarking in global development, I brought observations from this case together with existing literature on blame games and benchmarking. Through this process a four-part typology was created, which differentiated between benchmarking modes according to the nature of the lines of responsibility that were layered in to the system at the point of design, and whether there was stability or change in the nature of these lines of responsibility over time. Initially, the MDG architects incorporated diffuse lines of responsibility in to the framework. Challenges to this opacity began to emerge through UN reviews, with pressure emerging in particular for clearer lines of responsibility in the realms of overseas development assistance and domestic governance reform. With the superseding of the Millennium Development Goals with the Sustainable Development Goals, this push has been consolidated. As such, viewed holistically, the MDGs can be seen to have followed the mode of strategic clarification.
Beyond this embedding of calls for strategic clarifications initiated within MDG review processes, a number of additional important changes have occurred with the emergence of the Sustainable Development Goals. Perhaps most intriguingly, by extending the coverage of the framework from a limited subsection of lower income states to all members of the UN system, the SDGs will challenge an entrenched dichotomy between ‘developed’ countries to whom development prescriptions and yardsticks do not apply, and ‘developing countries’ to whom they do. When aligned with its inclusion of calls to prioritise the income growth of the poorest 40 per cent of domestic populations, SDG prescriptions can be seen to cut against the grain of contemporary distributional trends in many countries. As was the case with the MDGs, blame games and processes of contestation will determine which, if any, of the many targets and indicators associated with the SDGs gain traction across national and international policymaking processes.
The existing academic literature on the Millennium Development Goal framework provides valuable explorations of the power relations that were reflected in and (re)produced by this benchmarking initiative. While presenting important insights, the high level of abstraction within much of this literature served to underplay the role of agency and agent-level interactions in shaping the politics of the Millennium Development Goals.Footnote 79 Here, I have extended the MDG-related literature by systematically exploring the agent-level blame games that have accompanied the MDGs. Through the examined interactions, developed-country representatives were found to have sheeted home responsibility for underperformance to their developing country counterparts, and developing country representatives were found very much to have returned the favour. With the incorporation of clarifications on aid- and governance reform-related benchmarks in the SDG framework, both sides’ calls are being carried forward into the post-2015 initiative.
In important respects, the elite-level blame games that took place in and around the UN headquarters building represent a starting point in the politics of MDG and SDG global development benchmarking interventions. Throughout the lifetime of the MDGs, UN review summits provided a location in which strategic clarification of the lines of responsibility took place at dispersed intervals. Domestic political constellations across the global South provided locations in which parallel contests, undoubtedly, took place at a much greater level of frequency. These domestic blame games remained by and large off the radar of International Studies scholarship. With the SDGs’ enhanced focus on governance reform, accountability, and transparency, it is likely that the domestic blame games surrounding the post-2015 benchmarking exercise will be played with equal or greater levels of intensity. In order to extend our understanding of the intersection between blame games and benchmarking in global development, it is important that these coming interactions are subjected to a more complete examination.
