Do More with More

As part of my dissertation research I had a look at the Monterrey Consensus, one of the documents that came out of the UN-sponsored International Conference on Financing for Development held in Mexico in 2002. This is the opening statement of the document:

"We the heads of State and Government, gathered in Monterrey, Mexico, on 21 and 22 March 2002, have resolved to address the challenges of financing for development around the world, particularly in developing
countries. Our goal is to eradicate poverty, achieve sustained economic growth and promote sustainable development as we advance to a fully inclusive and equitable global economic system"(UN 2002:5).

The term "sustainable development", rising to international prominence at the UN conference in Rio de Jenairo in 1992 has now become part of the standard language.  I believe it has been embedded and co-opted by the development establishment and has become all things to all development policy-makers.

In the Monterrey consensus, a number of issues come to a head. First, the basic impetus for the conference was the Millenium Declaration (the precursor to the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of 8 broad quantitative development goals which the international community has signed on to and is attempting to realise by 2015). Essentially, the world had signed up for a huge project and they needed to make a plan to fund that project.  There was, what David Hulme has called, the 'millennium moment', a brief window of time in which there appeared to be an upswing in global goodwill and general agreement around taking economic, social and environmental development seriously. No doubt this was a good thing, an opportunity to grab hold of and the Monterrey conference was one of the early signs of action. The MDGs raise all kinds of other questions in and of themselves, but what the Monterrey consensus and indeed much mainstream development literature ignores is questions of global environmental sustainability.

I've also just finished reading Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart's 2008 book: "Fixing Failed States". What is striking from an environmental perspective is the complete silence on the sustainability of our lifestyle in rich countries, the ultimate goal of state-fixing (in theory), and the silence on whether everyone else joining us in our consumer lifestyle is a good thing.

The focus is simply on the vast amounts of wealth that our global financial system is generating and the need to hook failed states up to this flow and the flows of information criss-crossing the globe.  Implicit is the assumption: what's going on among rich countries is good and failed states need it too. So let's hook them up (not that we can, of course, but that's for another post, perhaps).

Maybe I'm just repeating things I've said and things Kurt has said.  But from the development studies perspective, there's an eerie silence on the viability of the lifestyle we hold up to other countries as both virtuous and as the only alternative. Reducing is the last thing on anyone's mind in development studies and among development policy makers.  What is needed, they say, is not less, but more - Do more with more.

Jordan (Manchester)