Millennium Development Goals and what comes after

MDGs took ten years to be formulated and agreed on by the world’s leaders. With less than three years to their expiration date, the debate on what should come after is rapidly speeding up. Ban Ki-Moon listed the post-2015 framework as one of his priorities and a reference to the post-MDG agenda has been made in the zero draft of the Rio+20 conference. How will the development goals look like after 2015 is still unclear though.

In his five-year Action Agenda, presented on January 25th, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon listed the post-2015 agenda as one of the priorities for his second term. The UN Task Team on Post-MDG, composed of many UN agencies, OECD and other actors, was appointed already in November 2011 and met for the first time in the beginning of January. It will prepare a report for the Secretary General on Post-MDG agenda by the end of May. Then it will hand the work over to the newly created High-Level Panel.

In the meantime, the preparations for the UN Rio+20 Conference are on course. The zero-draft of the declaration has been released in the beginning of January. It mentions the intention to agree on Sustainable Development Goals which “should complement and strengthen the MDGs in the development agenda for the post-2015 period, with a view to establishing a set of goals in 2015 which are part of the post-2015 UN Development Agenda.“ What it exactly means probably nobody knows, but it should become clearer in the coming months, as the summit approaches.

The new development goals will also need to be complementary with the Istanbul Programme of Action, adopted at the UN LDC IV Conference in May last year. The programme, with MDG at the core, outlines action for Least Developed Countries for 2011-2020.

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