Urban Millennium Partnership: Localizing MDGs

Background
At the Millennium Summit in September 2000 the member states of the United Nations reaffirmed their commitment to working towards a world in which the highest priority would be given to sustaining development and eliminating poverty. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reflected the agreements and resolutions made at the world conferences organized by the United Nations over the past decade. The goals have been commonly accepted as a framework for measuring development progress.

The MDGs have become the ‘organizing framework’ for many UN and bilateral programmes. This is because the MDGs contain a broad range of development goals ranging from poverty reduction, health, and gender equality to education and environmental sustainability. “The challenges and opportunities for Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are varied. What is unique about the MDGs is the time-bound element to them and that they shift thinking away from the input model. The eight goals that have been set encourage donor and partner countries to form compacts and coordination. The MDGs also provide an opportunity for the creation of common global development frameworks”.

Many international finance agencies and bilateral agencies have begun to use the MDG as the ‘development’ framework for international assistance programme. The national governments, through UN agencies have begun to report on the MDG monitoring. However, as more agencies and national governments get increasingly involved in the process, there are many important issues that have surfaced. The MDGs in themselves are the subject of debate when it comes to their operationalization. Some countries see them as a subtle form of conditionality, some see them as a framework for action, some see them as a set of generic objectives to guide development cooperation, and some see them as a global consensus without national relevance.

The Urban Millennium partnership on “localizing MDGs” is prepared in the context of operationalization of MDGs at the local level in urban settlements. It aims to address the common criticism of MDG as a ‘top-down’ process, which excludes Local Authority and other stakeholders’ involvement. The focus on local level is considered important because the national focus on achieving the ‘aggregate’ MDG targets and the current framework of monitoring and implementation, in general, does not take account of the “Urban” and the “Local” dimension. There is, thus, an inherent danger that even if the targets are achieved, the inequalities within a nation across people and places would still persist.