The U.S. government has finally published its own self assessment on progress relative to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – The United States Commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. And even by the standards of government bureaucratic flummery, this is a particularly lame document. One would never know from reading it just what the eight MDGs and their progress indicators are, much less the extent to which the USG is helping countries to meet them. Instead, there is simply a bald assertion that the United States is a strong and consistent supporter of the goals of the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations, followed by a resume of U.S. development strategy and its “four key components:” Country ownership and good governance; a pro-growth economic strategy; investing in people; and addressing failing and fragile states.
And even here, the document is much longer on assertion that evidence of achievement. Contrary to the report’s claim of “strong” U.S. support for the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the U.S. government has been one of the laggards when it comes to aligning aid with country priorities, “untying” aid (i.e., eliminating the requirement that aid be spent on donor country goods and services), using recipient country procurement and financial management systems and working through coordinated multi-donor and multilateral institutions. And as for supporting pro-growth economic policy, USAID’s funding for economic growth is at its lowest level in years. The two unambiguously positive features of U.S. aid are its support for AIDS relief (PEPFAR) and malaria, which implicitly address MDG 6, and debt relief (one of the indicators of MDG 8). The Millennium Challenge Act incorporates a number of the Paris Declaration principles, but it is too early to see any real effects in terms of poverty alleviation.
Tellingly, the report concludes by cautioning against assessing progress relative to specific MDGs lest we see any falling short as a manifestation of “development failure” and a consequent flagging of collective development efforts – thus basically throwing out the whole rationale for embarking on the MDGs in the first place, which was to have a common standard by which to judge effectiveness. It’s another version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” at a time when people are clamoring to know how the effort to eliminate global poverty and its manifestations is proceeding, and a good reminder of why we need to pass the Global Poverty Act, which will make achievement of the first MDG (to reduce global poverty by half by 2015) an explicit U.S. foreign policy objective and require the U.S. to show how it is using all of the tools at its disposal to achieve it.
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