How Should MDG Implementation Be Measured: Faster Progress or Meeting Targets?

A critically important aspect of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is that they provide concrete, time-bound and quantitative objectives against which poverty reduction can be measured. Governments can be held accountable by their people. The international community can hold accountable, and be held accountable by, national governments. If this newfound accountability is to be worthwhile, however, the method of determining progress or lack thereof must be the correct one. We argue that the correct measure is whether faster progress is being made, not whether the targets are to be met. The MDGs are not hard planning targets; they are aspirational norms and they offer benchmarks in an evaluative framework.How Should MDG Implementation Be Measured: Faster Progress or Meeting Targets?

Unequal Development in the 1990s: Growing Gaps in Human Capabilities

Questions about global income inequality inspire some of the most contentious debates among not only academics but politicians and the public at large. People look to data on income inequality as they might a stock market index to gauge how the world is doing. Are things on the right track? Is enough being done? In this age of globalization, the question is inevitably about whether 'Globalisation' – meaning liberalisation of economies and the integration of global trade and capital flows – brings prosperity or not. The controversies raging today over the many studies coming to different conclusions depend on how the questions are asked, and which data series are used. Such debates indicate little more than how economists and statisticians can find many answers to the seemingly same questions. More fundamentally, these debates mask attention on the growing disparities in human lives

Reducing Inequality – The Missing MDG: A Content Review of PRSPs and Bilateral Donor Policy Statements

Although important gains have been made in reducing global poverty, the pace of progress across the world is not on track to achieve the 2015 MDG targets. Is this due to lack of ownership on the part of national governments and the international community? This article examines whether the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and donor policy statements are aligned with MDG priorities and targets. The analysis found a high degree of commitment to MDGs as a whole but both PRSPs and donor statements are selective, consistently emphasising income poverty and social investments for education, health and water but not other targets concerned with empowerment and inclusion of the most vulnerable such as gender violence or women's political representation. The article concludes that a new, ninth Goal needs to be added – to reduce inequality – to make the MDGs aligned to the original purpose of the Millennium Declaration

Making the great transformation, November 13, 14, and 15, 2003

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Conference Series, a publication series that began publishing in 2006 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. This Conference took place during November 13, 14, and 15, 2003. Co-organized by Cutler Cleveland and Adil Najam.The conference discussants and participants analyze why transitions happen, and why they matter. Transitions are those wide-ranging changes in human organization and well being that can be convincingly attributed to a concerted set of choices that make the world that was significantly and recognizably different from the world that becomes. Transition scholars argue that that history does not just stumble along a pre-determined path, but that human ingenuity and entrepreneurship have the ability to fundamentally alter its direction. However, our ability to ‘will’ such transitions remains in doubt. These doubts cannot be removed until we have a better understanding of how transitions work

Looking ahead: forecasting and planning for the longer-range future, April 1, 2, and 3, 2005

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Conference Series, a publication series that began publishing in 2006 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. This was the Center's spring Conference that took place during April 1, 2, and 3, 2005.The conference allowed for many highly esteemed scholars and professionals from a broad range of fields to come together to discuss strategies designed for the 21st century and beyond. The speakers and discussants covered a broad range of subjects including: long-term policy analysis, forecasting for business and investment, the National Intelligence Council Global Trends 2020 report, Europe’s transition from the Marshal plan to the EU, forecasting global transitions, foreign policy planning, and forecasting for defense

Beyond outputs: pathways to symmetrical evaluations of university sustainable development partnerships

As the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014) draws to a close, it is timely to review ways in which the sustainable development initiatives of higher education institutions have been, and can be, evaluated. In their efforts to document and assess collaborative sustainable development program outcomes and impacts, universities in the North and South are challenged by similar conundrums that confront development agencies. This article explores pathways to symmetrical evaluations of transnationally partnered research, curricula, and public-outreach initiatives specifically devoted to sustainable development. Drawing on extensive literature and informed by international development experience, the authors present a novel framework for evaluating transnational higher education partnerships devoted to sustainable development that addresses design, management, capacity building, and institutional outreach. The framework is applied by assessing several full-term African higher education evaluation case studies with a view toward identifying key limitations and suggesting useful future symmetrical evaluation pathways. University participants in transnational sustainable development initiatives, and their supporting donors, would be well-served by utilizing an inclusive evaluation framework that is infused with principles of symmetry