The Global Partnership for Development: A Review of MDG 8 and Proposals for the Post-2015 Development Agenda

The eighth Millennium Development Goal (MDG 8) covered a “global partnership for development” in areas including aid, trade, debt relief, drugs, and information and communications technology (ICT). Since the goal was formulated, there has been progress as well as gaps in the areas which were covered. In this paper, Charles Kenny reviews what worked and what didn’t with MDG 8 and proposes alternatives for a post-2015 development agenda. The world has changed since the original MDGs were created. By 2030, a global compact on development progress linking OECD-DAC aid and policy reform to low-income countries as target beneficiaries (the implicit model of MDG 8) would be irrelevant to three-quarters of the world. Half of the rich world will be in non-DAC countries, and the share of aid in global transfers will continue to shrink. Global public goods provision will increasingly require the active participation of (at least) the G-20 nations. A post-2015 global partnership agenda should involve a mixed approach to compact and partnership issues: binding “global compact” targets under specific post-2015 sectoral goals focused on the role for aid alongside a stand-alone global public goods goal with time-bound, numerical targets covering trade, investment, migration, technology, the environment and global institutions.