The discipline of history is predicated on the belief that we need to look to the past to learn for our future. The famous words of George Santayana, ‘Those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it’, speaks truth to the idea that unless lessons are learned, they risk being repeated (Santayana, 1905). All too often, disciplines outside of history forget the importance of this concept. In the discipline and practice of international development, forward-thinking agendas have too often forgotten the importance of exploration into the past. But in looking into the past, we can learn important lessons – some never again to duplicate, and some that can be the basis of important best practices. It is imperative not only to avoid duplication of past mistakes, but also to repeat lessons and experiences from the past that can enrich future development goals. This is the uniqueness of this book. At a time when scholars and practitioners are focusing on the ‘post-2015 agenda’, investigating future opportunities for the development agenda following the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), we are asking: what happened before 2015? What lessons must we learn from the design and implementation of the MDGs? What worked? What did not? We contend that by looking into the recent past, we can make a more robust post-2015 agenda that builds upon the momentum set by the MDGs, but learns from both its mistakes and its victories. The MDGs emerged from the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000, following the adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration which sought to ensure that there were overarching goals to be achieved within a set time period. Indeed, they were ‘world's time-bound and quantified targets for addressing poverty in its many dimensions – income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion – while promoting gender equality, education and environmental sustainability. They [were] also basic human rights – the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter and security’ (UN, 2006). The emergence of the MDGs was the first time that we saw such a large global initiative using the monitoring concept of objectives, indicators and timelines as an integral component of the strategy. Organisations and states were not simply focused on what needed to change, but by when.