Post-2015 Development Agenda

Debate between Alan Duncan and Tom Harris

Tuesday 23rd October 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)]

I thank the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) for securing a debate on such an important topic.

Securing global agreement on a framework that updates the millennium development goals is a priority for the coalition Government as we approach 2015. I welcome the broader parliamentary engagement that is occurring. The Government are pleased that an independent inquiry into the post-2015 development agenda has been launched by the International Development Committee. The Department for International Development is keen to work with the House on this topic. The inquiry provides an opportunity for key players to contribute their views on the post-2015 agenda, and I look forward to reading the final report.

The eight MDGs launched in 2000 have generated an unprecedented degree of global consensus on development and have also worked well as a communication and advocacy tool, both with the UK public and internationally. The framework has helped to focus people’s minds and efforts on tackling global poverty in terms of real, practical action. It has channelled actions logically and consistently and released the full effort of the world on the issues covered by the eight goals. As a focused set of targets and indicators, the MDGs have encouraged better availability and quality of data in developing countries, making it easier to increase the focus on results. We now need to build on that success.

In terms of how the world has done against the MDGs, the picture is mixed, as we heard earlier. We have seen unprecedented reductions in poverty rates, and achievement of the targets on increased access to safe drinking water and primary education. Progress has been slower, however, for nutrition, basic sanitation and child mortality rates, and maternal mortality is lagging a long way behind. The MDG framework itself has its doubters. One criticism is that the MDGs’ focus on results at the global level has masked uneven progress both between and within countries. The degree to which the set of goals has fitted closely with countries’ own development strategies has varied, and a number of critical issues were not covered, such as growth or conflict.

In some cases, the framework’s focus on quantitative results has skewed incentives—for example, the focus on measuring school attendance rates rather than the quality of education actually received by those who attend the school. As we approach the 2015 deadline for the targets set just over a decade ago, there is a big question to be answered about what should happen next. Unsurprisingly, there are a number of different views. An updated framework for development needs to build on success so far, while also addressing the weaknesses of the current MDGs. The world has changed significantly since 2000, so it is vital that any new international framework for development is able to reflect the new challenges and opportunities that we face both today and in the future.

Agreeing a development framework to replace the MDGs will be challenging. There are a number of intellectual challenges and debates around them that are both technically and politically complex. First, there are clear questions around what should be included in a post-2015 framework for development and how each issue should be measured. Given that some of the MDGs under the current framework are unlikely to be reached by 2015, some argue that the goals should simply be rolled forward post-2015. However, that would collide with the fact that a number of important issues such as conflict, corruption, poor governance and climate change were not included in the MDGs in the first place. Simply rolling forward the current goals would ignore the importance of quality as well as quantity in the development process.

Secondly, although this is covered in part by MDG 7, there is a view that the MDGs should be replaced by a framework focusing much more on environmental sustainability and not just on poverty eradication. Our ability to manage environmental risks and use natural resources sustainably is critical to increasing the living standards of the poorest people in the world, but would such a shift risk losing the sharp focus of the current set of goals?

Thirdly, there is an argument for adopting development goals that apply to emerging and rich countries as well as the poorest countries. The actions of the rich—for instance, on carbon emissions, which have been mentioned—should not perhaps be allowed to damage the interests of the poor.

Those debates are crucial for the poorest people in the world and must be addressed in any new framework for development. The UK is an intellectual leader on international development issues, and we have an important role to play. The Department for International Development has set up a new team dedicated to thinking about those issues and to engaging with international Governments, civil society, business and individuals.

More broadly, the process for debating many of the issues and deciding on an international development framework post-2015 is well under way. The UN Secretary-General has launched a high-level panel on the post-2015 development agenda; the panel will deliver a report by May 2013, making

“recommendations regarding the vision and shape of a post-2015 development agenda”.

I am pleased that the Prime Minister has been asked to co-chair the panel alongside the Presidents of Indonesia and Liberia.

The panel met in New York on 25 September. Subsequent meetings will be in London imminently, on 1 November, and in Monrovia and Jakarta early next year. The meetings will focus on development challenges at three levels. The London meeting will focus on poverty at the individual level, while the following meetings will tackle national challenges and international issues—in other words, people, then countries, then global.

The panel’s overall aim is to set out an ambitious new agenda for ending poverty in the years beyond 2015 while maintaining the simplicity contained in the current MDGs. The panel is clear that it does not want the new framework to focus on aid only. A new framework should focus on helping the poorest people get out of poverty and stay out of it. It should apply to very poor countries as well as to countries where aid plays a less important role, but where large numbers of poor people still live. It is not simply about handouts from rich countries. The panel wants its outcome to reflect a new global consensus on how development works and what matters in practice for success.

Alongside the panel’s London meeting next week will be a series of discussions with civil society, business and young people. It is a critical part of the panel’s work and is vital if its conclusions are to be taken seriously by the international community when the panel reports at the end of May next year. I reassure the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Mr Harris) that the process to support the Prime Minister in Whitehall involves a cross-ministerial team, with DFID, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs all working together to enable coherence with the Rio+20 follow-up and the climate change agenda.

[Mr Harris]

While the Minister is on that subject, can he touch on the two-year delay so far in the Government’s setting up of the network of marine conservation areas? It has not received an awful lot of Government attention and I am extremely concerned about it, as are other Members. It offers a poor example to other developing nations when we lecture them on how to conserve marine areas.

[Mr Duncan]

I do not think that that is immediately relevant to the topic on the Order Paper for this debate, but it is an important issue, so I am happy to write to the hon. Gentleman with as much information as we have on that question.

The hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) discussed jobs and economic opportunities. I assure her that the issue will be addressed through a dedicated session during the panel’s meeting here in London next week. That panel will draw on this year’s comprehensive world development report by the World Bank, which deals specifically with jobs.

Although the high-level panel report is an important input into the international debate on the post-2015 framework, it is not the only one. The UN Secretary-General will produce his own report for the special session of the General Assembly next September. Numerous other forums are discussing the post-2015 development framework, but the UK Government will work hard to maintain coherence among the different processes.

To reply to some of the comments made earlier, the hon. Members for Edinburgh North and Leith and for Workington (Sir Tony Cunningham) both mentioned climate change. The Rio+20 meetings have established an open working group specifically to propose sustainable development goals, as that is another strand of the activity in play at the moment. On inequality, we must focus on the poorest and not just measure average success, which can disguise a lot of facts beneath a simple headline figure.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) gave us a master class on how the MDGs might be broadened after 2015 by the introduction of some more thoughtful concepts of sustainable development. He said that they might include planetary boundaries and zones of ecological stress. [Laughter.] Although some might laugh, I assure him and the House that the team at DFID are very familiar with planetary boundaries, and particularly with the idea of doughnut economics, as it is described, which combines planetary boundaries with social minimums—in other words, the constraints of the environment with some of the basic needs of human life. I have to say that when it comes to doughnut economics, I prefer to keep it simple.

The hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow mentioned our withdrawal from the International Labour Organisation. I urge her to stop repeating her party’s mantra. Let me say it one more time so that she understands the decision that we took after the multilateral aid review. Our conclusion after considering the ILO was that its main activity does not coincide sufficiently with DFID’s prime objectives, so it is true to say that we have terminated our core funding, but we work with the ILO on a case-by-case basis in countries and on programmes where its work is useful for the elimination of poverty.