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Views from the Center

CGD experts offer ideas and analysis to improve international development policy. Also check out our Global Health blog and US Development Policy blog.

 

July 1, 2015

Can the SDGs Really ‘Leave No One Behind’?

What does ‘Leave No One Behind’ mean in the context of the post-2015 development agenda? From the UN High Level Panel to the Open Working Group to the recently released zero draft of sustainable development goals, presidents, prime ministers, UN envoys, civil society, and citizens around the globe have rallied around the call. But how does this soaring rhetoric translate in practice, and how will we know if the world has succeeded in achieving it?

Casey Dunning and Molly Elgin-Cossart
November 20, 2014

Giddy Optimism on 2015

Three big conferences next year could affect the next two decades of global development.  The first will bring world leaders to Addis Ababa in July for the Third International Conference on Financing for Development. 

Charles Kenny
September 11, 2014

Strange Bedfellows: The Politics of Penurious Poverty Lines (Part II)

The head of USAID claims that “political momentum” is building to make extreme poverty “central” to the development agenda.  The question is: How does one build political momentum for a global development agenda that excludes 5 billion people and the middle class of (nearly) every large developing country?

Lant Pritchett
September 4, 2014

A Development Agenda without Developing Countries? The Politics of Penurious Poverty Lines (Part I)

“Dollar a day” poverty morphed from a technical curiosity that interests at most a few dozen technocrats to the first of the Millennium Development Goals. It is now one of only two corporate goals of the World Bank (in spite of its obvious inconsistency with the World Bank’s own Articles of Agreement).  And , according to a recent (August 18, 2014) missive from Rajiv Shah, the head of USAID “political momentum” is “build[ing] to make the end of extreme poverty central to the post-2015 Development Agenda.”

Lant Pritchett
August 13, 2014

What’s the Point of the Post-2015 Agenda?

The UN Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals completed its outcome document a few weeks ago, putting forth 17 goals and 169 targets.  The optimistic take: that’s only just over twice the number of goals in the Brazil-Germany World Cup match.  But for all the space devoted to targeting almost every conceivable area of global progress, there was one topic on which the OWG was notably silent: what’s the purpose of all of this?

Charles Kenny and Casey Dunning

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