Thanks for your feedback! I’d like to add to the two points you raised.

On your first point, in addition to the design of the goals, the fact that they set the bar rather low (the development community has mostly viewed the MDGs – at least MDGs 1 through 6 – as the least common denominator goals) indicated that they addressed the challenges LDCs faced. Documents suggest that middle-income countries did not necessarily find the goals to apply to them and thus made less of an effort to integrate them into their planning. There are of course different phases to the roll-out of the MDGs, so this statement does not apply to all countries at all phases, but I think that on average it’s a fair assessment.

On your second point, I think the process was more complicated. The Millennium Project and other entities, including the World Bank, spent quite a bit of energy and resources on costing exercises, both at national and international levels. The understanding was that knowing how much the implementation of the goals would cost could help governments plan their budgets accordingly and allocate funds to the social sectors that helped them achieve their localized MDG targets. One of the functions of the PRSPs was to track funding, and most national strategies that I have seen similarly track funding and budgetary allocations to various areas, including but not limited to social sectors.

I think the key question is: how and to what extent do globally agreed goals impact national planning? What factors help us understand the variation between countries that translate such goals in their national contexts and those that don’t? The answers to these questions are important, in particular because of the lack of enforcement mechanisms. This study looks at some of the socioeconomic variables that help us understand the variation, but political variables (such as accountability mechanisms between citizens and state, government’s tendency to emphasize pro-poor policies, citizens’ access to government to demand policies that reduce poverty, etc.) are just as important and would shed further light on the questions raised.

Thanks again for your thoughts and all my best,
Elham

Thanks for sharing this important piece of research. As an optimist on both the MDGs and SDGs, I would flag two points. 1) It makes perfect sense that LDCs national plans would reflect MDGs more, given design and implementation of the goals. BUT is a an important point to bear in mind moving forward with a more universal agenda. And 2) national funding didn’t align because “we” (the development community) didn’t ask, at least not until later in the game. Think of the usual development logframes (UNDAF etc., project) and only rarely did they track government’s national allocations. Some UN agencies are just getting started on tracking public investments in the social sector. (http://blogs.unicef.org/2015/06/25/toward-better-investments-in-children-in-latin-america/). And in many countries relationships between social ministries and Ministries of Finance can be quite dysfunctional. Here’s looking to an SDG review process that includes governments’ allocations to children and women…

Regards.
Samantha Cocco-Klein
Senior Adviser, Equity for Children
PhD Student, Public and Urban Policy, New School NY

Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I completely agree with your point that a disaggregated assessment of public health spending would shed further light on the extent to which governments align their national plans with globally agreed targets. If a government increasingly spends its money on personnel without allocating resources to material necessities (such as hospitals, medical equipment, medicine, etc.), does that necessarily indicate greater national alignment with MDG 4 and 5? I guess to some extent it does, but as you correctly highlight, dependence on donor resources is not sustainable and not in line with the spirit of the MDGs. My study examines overall trends in a sample of 50 countries without delving into a more detailed exploration of each government’s strategies. An analysis of donor expenditure in the various sectors would certainly add value to the broader assessment offered in this study.

thanks for a really interesting post. Drawing on my very recent experience in Tajikistan, I think when looking at the impact of MDG’s, in addition to looking at the public spending, it’s important to see how the donor spending in those countries have been changing in terms of volumes and sectors it is allocated to. In Tajikistan, the government spending on health, for example, is so limited that it mainly goes to cover salaries (and the situation almost hasn’t changed since mid 2000s), while all the rest is covered by donor money. So, essentially, the strategy does not have any public money whatsoever underpinning it, but many (actually most of activities under the strategy) are being implemented nevertheless in one way or another by donors. It clearly is a very unsustainable model, but that’s the topic for another research =)