Millennium Development Goals

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, having had to take what the Americans euphemistically call a comfort break, I am sorry that I missed the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, in which he made reference to work going on at the London School of Economics. I assure him that I will read Hansard, and I thank him for the reference.

The UN report of 2012 on the MDGs shows a chequered picture that includes considerable successes, to which other noble Lords drew attention. However, it is important not to be intellectually lazy. We have no way of knowing how far changes happened because of the MDGs. Many of them might have happened anyway. At a minimum, we can say that it was an important consciousness-raising exercise on a global level—and probably quite a bit more than that. However, caution is needed in looking at the sources of the changes that happened around the world.

Today a much wider global discussion than at the millennium is going on about what the successor goals and strategies should be. This is one contribution to that discussion, as is right and proper. However, it is obvious that there are dangers as well as positives in this. For example, there could be a clamour to introduce multiple new goals, because everyone has their list of “musts”: must do this, must include that. So far in the debate I have listed 14 “musts” in what noble Lords said. It is clear that there should be some control over the list of “musts”, otherwise there is no chance of perpetuating a sustained programme. Noble Lords will remember the adage, “If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority”. I will make three brief comments based on that.

First, we should be conservative about the number of goals and the range of countries to which they should apply. In this sense I disagree with quite a bit that other noble Lords said. There should be no going above the existing number, and the goals should apply only to countries that have a significant proportion of those whom Paul Collier famously called “the bottom billion”. Aspirational targets are of no value without metrics, kept and systematised by the UN. Again, this suggests a concentration on concrete and definable ambitions, partly because the methodology already exists and also because there is a sustained amount of information on the existing millennial goals.

Secondly, it is very important to note that the pursuit of the MDGs was facilitated by a relatively benign economic environment after the turn of the century. The next few years might not look at all like this. We live in an extremely iffy and perturbing world. The world economy is slowing down; there is gigantic debt in the West; the EU is poised on the edge of potential catastrophe; in spite of the good news this morning about a ceasefire, there is the possibility of extended wars in the Middle East; and food security is looming in public consciousness as a global problem in a way that it did not at the millennium. This means that we will have to build into our assessment of the MDGs a range of new risk factors. A lot of attention must be given to how this is done.

Thirdly, we have one MDG where, because I work in the field, my view is that we have made no impact at all. It is the goal of ensuring environmental sustainability. Rio+20 has been a flop; in 20 years, virtually nothing of substance has been achieved. There are very serious problems ahead, especially from unmastered climate change. The level of CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere is mounting every year. The world has made no sustained response of substance to this issue. Some people have suggested that sustainability should be folded across all the millennial goals. I disagree; it needs to be specified and it also needs metrics. For example, we need poorer countries to be able to jump technologies in the development process, as they did with mobile phones. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on any of these issues.