Related Content

Some insights from the Understanding Risk Forum 2014

The EADI conference has closed its doors. What the conference has shown us is that the debate on inequality and the rise of the middle class in developing countries opens many windows of opportunity to reframe development and development policy as...

Review of Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual by Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel. 

The World Conference on Humanitarian Studies created space for debating international engagement in fragile and conflict-affected settings

Although the MDGs are arguably the most politically important pact ever made for international development, they harbor several lessons for their successor framework.

A new system is needed for global governance, in which there is harmony and balance between shared values.

Donors are estimated to receive a return from development aid of 50–80%. To understand the financial effects of aid on donor countries, we need a new economic model.

In any situation, there is a chance you might lose and a chance you might win. We start a new blog on management of risks, within and beyond development cooperation.

Criticism of East Asia’s alleged self-interest-led development aid can also be applied to Western donors.

Creating shared value is a new concept to get private sector involved in building an inclusive economy. But how different it is from CSR?

The debate on development policy, between ‘traditional’ aid and ‘modern’ cooperation centred around trade and economic activity, is a false one. The latter is advocated in a new white paper by Dutch minister Lilianne Ploumen, but is in fact a...

Norway’s recent international cooperation white paper, Sharing for Prosperity, seems stubbornly non-conformist. For it recommits Norway to some fundamental, if today unfashionable, purposes: for low-income lands, pursuit of growth-with-r...

Discussions on what should be the new global agenda after the expiry of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) started years ago. The post-2015 agenda has been central in several previous debates on The Broker. This is a short synopsis of other r...

The poverty reduction goal already embodies inequality. Even if we agree that it under-values things, it is far from obvious that adding an overall inequality measure is the best corrective. We need to think clearly about what is missing and how b...

Like all contributors to the debate so far, I am convinced that inequality should be an important theme on anyone’s development agenda. But the label ‘post-2015 development agenda’ has a very specific referent, and opinions differ if inequality sh...

In the on-going discussion on inequality, “new” seems to be the magic word. Unfortunately we still have the old problem, being that 1,3 billion people have to live on less than a dollar a day.

INGOs are at a crossroads. Caught up in a tide of technocracy, they have become increasingly managerialist – ‘outsider’ experts disconnected from the real struggle. But which road should they take? Can they transform societies, or should they opt...

At the end of November, 2,000 representatives of governments, international organisations and NGOs convened in Busan as the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. Just before the meeting we proposed four criteria by which to judge its outco...

For many decades development aid of western donors has been pretty well shielded from probing questions by the public opinion and politicians. Development aid was, and to some extend still is, essentially seen as “helping poor people”, a charitabl...

Many observers regarded Africa as a lost continent just over a decade ago. The stabilization and structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and liberalization of the economy in the 1990s had not produced the desired private sector investment re...

The wording of the Outcomes Document from the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid is largely agreed, and reflects much of the new thinking on aid: statebuilding and peacebuilding; human security; transparency and results. 

“We’ll always have Paris” says one of the most famous lines from the movie Casablanca. In the international donor community, “always [having] Paris” would refer to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness launched back in 2005. Six years and two...

Development organizations have yet to come to terms with the inherent complexity of institutional change. Institutional change takes time, and the kind of institution best suited to a given situation depends on the context. In other words, a succe...

Should the 'aid effectiveness' agenda be replaced by 'development effectiveness' principles

There is little chance that traditional and new donors will reach an agreement on the best way to deliver aid.

In April 2011 the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD released its statement “Welcoming New Partnerships in International Development Cooperation.” The main objective of this statement is to forge a closer partnership between tradit...

The Broker will publish interesting publications and current affairs in de field of global development.

The Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is like a Mecca for complexity science. Physicists, biologists, cosmologists, anthropologists, playwrights and even novelists spend their time here, breaking down disciplinary boundaries. This time the focus is...

The Millennium Development Goals claim our attention as today’s pro-poor aid agenda. Yet going by who gets what and from whom, the world’s real agenda looks distinctly pro-rich.The MDGs have been a singular success as a vehicle for many in the aid...

It seems New York City provides a fitting backdrop to the UN MDG summit. The city has many contrasting faces, as do the summit and the MDG-related side events.As the official conference kicked off yesterday only a few blocks away, I found myself i...

UN summits follow a more or less predetermined route. Heads of state and government and heads of major international organizations all come and make their declarations. In most of them, there is nothing really new or interesting. Now and then, how...

The end of the first day of the MDG-fest at the UN General Assembly and everyone seems to be promising more and better partnerships: between the public, private and civil sectors; between international agencies (the IMF and ILO had a love-in in Os...

The UN Secretary-General’s report speaks firmly on keeping international commitments and this week’s Summit will no doubt produce some strengthening of global commitment towards the MDGs. This is good and important for welfare in poor countries. B...

Some countries stage high-level side events to show their commitment to the MDGs or otherwise underline their own priorities. Today I went to one, organized by the German government and presided by German chancellor Angela Merkel herself. She mode...

I am in New York for the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On Monday morning, the delegates from the UN member states will officially finalize the talks about how the targets set for 2015 can be met, despite the lack of progres...

The big issue for the MDG summit, the 'big push' to 2015 and even the post-2015 debates (there's a newly agreed UN summit due in Sept 2013) should really be a focus on equity and on the poorest. Why? Because nearly three-quarters of the world's po...

There are only five years left to deliver the targets set by the Millennium Development Goals for poverty, education, gender, health and the environment. The MDGs have had success so far: generating global consensus, supporting advocacy, mobilizin...

The MDG Summit happening in New York next week is generating a lot of news on the need for a more effective international effort to support the efforts of poor people around the world to improve their lives. The draft summit outcomes document cont...

The ISEE 2010 Tuesday sessions by Tim Jackson and Juliet Schor hit on the heart of the economic model (accumulation, growth and consumerism) by proposing innovative visions of how to reform capitalism towards human well-being.Before the talk start...

On Sunday I join the working group on political strategies. The two dozen people assembled in the courtyard repeatedly return to a big question that begs a satisfactory answer in order to develop viable political strategies for degrowth. Back in...

A group of a dozen of us are engaged in an animated debate, sitting around a table in the historic courtyard of the University of Barcelona, trying to combine hard work and at least some indulgence in this balmy day. We have spent the last twenty...

I´m new at blogging and perhaps its best to learn the ropes at a conference where the discussions don´t quite go so late. On our first day, the last panel wrapped up around 10:00 pm and dinner finished just shy of midnight. Our plenary sessions a...

Jeroen van den Bergh of ICTA/UAB talks to Louise Stoddard at the 2nd Conference on Economic Degrowth, Barcelona, March 2010.

The man sat next to me in the packed conference hall was having trouble tuning in. The first session of the Second Conference on Economic Degrowth had begun and whilst we sat down to discuss de-growth the number of people in the plush wood panelle...

Only a few hours till the conference begins. I´ve been looking forward to this degrowth conference for months, though not without some trepidation. I cannot embrace the term degrowth enthusiastically—it sounds about as intuitively appealing as und...

We are all starters in the sector and fear that the development community has become an inward looking culture that has hardly any interaction with outsiders. How we think the sector is evolving?

Complexity approaches have a lot to offer the aid business, if it is not already too late. We asked Nils Boesen to comment on the blog postings from a recent conference.

The economic, food and climate crises are making it even harder to achieve the MDGs. But they also provide a unique opportunity to formulate a new narrative to guide global development after 2015.

One major point to emerge from the day of free-flowing and wide-ranging discussions at Brussels was the need for a new paradigm. As Frans reports, 'Among the hundred plus attendants there was a general feeling that we need a new paradigm, or a new...

In my last blog I discussed the fact that poverty and even rights-based agendas can be easily co-opted into a 'Washington Consensus' policy paradigm. How then can we avoid this propensity? In my background paper I suggested that this should be don...

Frans Bieckmann is the Editor in Chief of The BrokerLooking back on, and having briefly chewed over a long day of interesting talks and debates at the High Level Policy Forum in Brussels, I will share with you some of the threads and trends t...

Marieke Hounjet is reporting live from the Brussels Forum for The BrokerThe second plenary of the High Level Policy Forum today in Brussels was titled: ‘What are the key meta-processes shaping development over the next 10-15 years and what do they...

Marieke Hounjet is reporting live from the Brussels Forum for The BrokerIn his welcoming word Andy Sumner states that 2015 ‘is a line in the sand’ and that therefore it is good idea to have a discussion on the future of the Millennium Development...

The MDGs provide a set of indicators of development. They adopt an approach to development that has been influenced by management thinking. Setting targets that are measurable was fashionable throughout the 1990’s but is perhaps getting rather tar...

In this contribution we directly address the four queries posed for the debate. To do so we need to note at the outset that from a development perspective it can easily be argued that the adoption of the MDGs by the world community in September 20...

I welcome Andy Sumner’s contribution on the future of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). While there has been much debate around achieving the MDGs, and tracking progress of countries and regions, little has been said about the future of the...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a visionary statement. They have focused the attention and intention of the world towards the challenge of our time. But they are a product of our past and as such are simultaneously unhelpful as they di...

The eight MDGs could simply be summarized as a desire to reduce poverty (MDG 1) through addressing its various dimensions such as hunger, malnutrition, poor health (including addressing HIV/AIDS, malaria, and poor maternal health), lack of basic e...

The business of working up successive development agendas and policy formulas has beset the aid system from its beginnings more than sixty years ago. The MDGs are the latest in a long parade of earnest exhortations. As the “After 2015” exercise cl...

On 23 June 2009, the Residence Palace in Brussels hosted the High Level Policy Forum ‘After 2015: promoting pro-poor growth after the MDGs’. The forum was a joint initiative of IDS, DSA, EADI, DFID and ActionAid.

The deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) isn’t until 2015. But it is time to begin thinking about the ‘MDG-plus’ agenda. But what, if anything, should replace the MDGs as a policy focus or new development paradigm?

The responses thus far to the special report on civic driven change (The Broker 10) have helped to launch a public and international conversation with far-ranging implications for the work of democracy building and development. I look forward to h...

Burkinabé writer and politician Joseph Ki-Zerbo said,‘On ne développe pas, on se développe’ (‘People aren’t developed; people develop themselves’). He argued for a development strategy ‘that gets its force from local realities and our own values,...

There is no doubt that a lot still needs to be done when to achieve the MDGs (millennium development goals) and other important development goals. There is also no doubt that Europe could play a very important role in this process. However, it is...

The Broker asked Ondrej Horký to reflect on the following three questions concerning Europe's role in internatioanl development.

The European Report on Development is likely to bring only marginally new perspectives into the field of development, to kill whatever originality European research may have, and to be counterproductive to the attempts to shift the responsibility...