Summary

I start from a position of skepticism of the value of having post-2015 goals at all and even more of including governance in such a set. Global-level statistics on the MDGs appear quite accurate, and progress in some areas is used to support the argument for such global goals. However, there is great variation at the national level, with one study, for example, showing that about 50 percent of countries are on track to meet extreme poverty, gender, child mortality, and water goals, but less than 30 percent are on track to meet hunger, maternal mortality, and HIV/AIDS goals.

I draw several key lessons when considering this kind of evidence. First, higher growth countries did better in meeting MDG targets than lower growth countries, which could suggest that the development community should focus on fostering economic growth instead of promoting a new set of targets. MDG success is contextual and deeply affected by a country's social and economic situation. Second, progress has been greatest in areas where measured performance captures (mostly) logistical improvements. Building more schools and laying water pipes are largely technical exercises. Progress on sanitation issues, on the other hand, has arguably been slower because the logistical component involves more complex political and social interactions.

A third lesson is that because targets focus on parts of the development process that can be seen and quickly assessed and not on the harder to see (and to do) and longer to achieve parts, there are likely to be large gaps between form and function (where performance only looks better). Many of the best-performing MDG countries now have many schools and high enrollment rates in schools, for instance, but also experience severe shortages of teachers and textbooks and major gaps between enrollment and achievement. There are also gaps within countries between rural and urban areas: the fourth lesson is that goals and targets can bias performance to easier concentrated urban areas, creating a gap between performance in these locations and the more distributed local, rural settings. A final lesson is that targets encourage promises – of budgetary priorities in particular – that often do not lead to actual follow-through, creating an execution gap that is not easily closed.