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² Power, Michael, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

³ See André Broome and Joel Quirk, ‘Governing the world at a distance: the practice of global benchmarking’; James Harrison and Sharifah Sekalala, ‘Addressing the compliance gap? UN initiatives to benchmark the human rights performance of states and corporations’; Alexandra Homolar, ‘Human security benchmarks: Governing human wellbeing at a distance’; Caroline Kuzemko, ‘Climate change benchmarking: Constructing a sensible future?’; Genevieve LeBaron and Jane Lister, ‘Benchmarking global supply chains: the power of the “ethical audit” regime’; Tony Porter, ‘Global benchmarking networks: the cases of disaster risk reduction and supply chains’; Leonard Seabrooke and Ducan Wigan, ‘How activists use benchmarks: Reformist and revolutionary benchmarks for global economic justice’; Sending, Ole Jacob and Harald Sande Lie, Jon, ‘The limits of global authority: World Bank benchmarks in Ethiopia and Malawi’: all of the articles listed here in Review of International Studies, 41:5 (2015), this pp. 813–1010CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, Fioramonti, Lorenzo, How Numbers Rule the World (London: Zed, 2014)Google Scholar; Fioramonti, Lorenzo, ‘A post-GDP world: Why it’s time to end the tyranny of Gross Domestic Product’, Foreign Policy (2 June 2015)Google Scholar, available at: {http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/02/a-post-gdp-world/} accessed 8 June 2015.

⁴ For detailed insights into the historical origins of benchmarking and statistics in the field of international development, see Arndt, Hans, ‘Economic development: a semantic history’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 29:3 (1981), pp. 457–466CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A significant foundation on which modern practices have been built is widely believed to have been provided by Staley, Eugene, The World Economy in Transition (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1939)Google Scholar.

⁵ Oxfam, , Failing to Deliver: The IMF and the Millennium Development Goals (Washington: Oxfam, 2003)Google Scholar; Garrity, Dennis, ‘Agroforestry and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals’, Agroforestry Systems, 61:1 (2004), pp. 5–17Google Scholar; Haines, Andy and Cassels, Andrew, ‘Can the Millennium Development Goals be attained?’, British Journal of Medicine, 329:7462 (2004), pp. 394–397CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Sharma, Shalendra, ‘The promise of monterrey: Meeting the Millennium Development Goals’, World Policy Journal, 21:3 (2004), pp. 51–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Akiyama, Suzanne, ‘Millennium Development Goals’, in Naonobu Minato (ed.), New Approaches to Development and Changing Sector Issues (Tokyo: Foundation for Advanced Studies in International Development, 2005), pp. 34–50Google Scholar; Gutner, Tamar, ‘When “doing good” does not: the IMF and the Millennium Development Goals’, in Deborah Avant, Martha Finnemore, and Susan Sell (eds), Who Governs the Globe? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 266–291CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hulme, David and Scott, James, ‘The political economy of the MDGs: Retrospect and prospect for the world’s biggest promise’, New Political Economy, 15:2 (2010), pp. 293–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McArthur, John, ‘Own the goals: What the Millennium Development Goals have accomplished’, Foreign Affairs, 92:2 (2013), pp. 152–163Google Scholar.

⁶ Throughout the article, the terms ‘developed country’ and ‘developing country’ are used to refer to members and non-members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development respectively.

⁷ At the time of writing, the content of the Sustainable Development Goals had been drafted by the Open Working Group and reviewed and approved at the close of the 68^th Session of the United National General Assembly. The final sign-off on the SDGs will take place in September 2015, with the UN Secretary General and his Special Advisor on the SDGs predicting overall stability in framework content. See Liz Ford, ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, The Guardian Online (19 January 2015), available at: {http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jan/19/sustainable-development-goals-united-nations} accessed 26 March 2015. Throughout the article, I use the term Sustainable Development Goals to refer to the version approved at the close of the 68^th Session, which included 17 Goals and around 160 related indicators.

⁸ Amongst the large body of MDG-related literature considered below, patterns of engagement and resistance displayed by particular agents in particular fora are explored in most detail by Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, ‘Are the MDGs a priority for development strategies and Aid programs? Only few are!’, International Poverty Center Working Paper Series, No. 48 (2008), pp. 1–28Google Scholar; Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko and Hulme, David, ‘International norm dynamics and “the end of poverty”: Understanding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)’, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 17:1 (2011), pp. 17–36Google Scholar.

⁹ See, for example, Duncan Green, ‘The power of numbers: Why the MDGs were flawed (and post-2015 Goals look set to go the same way)’, Oxfam Blogs (14 August 2014) available at: {http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/the-power-of-numbers-why-the-mdgs-were-flawed-and-post2015-goals-look-set-to-go-the-same-way/} accessed 8 June 2015.

¹⁰ The taken-for-grantedness of this conceptualisation amongst groups inside the World Bank, for example, is touched upon by several analyses. See Bebbington, Anthony, Guggenhein, Scott, Olson, Elizabeth, and Woolcock, Michael, ‘Exploring social capital debates at the World Bank’, Journal of Development Studies, 40:5 (2004), pp. 33–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clegg, Liam, ‘Our dream is a world full of poverty indicators: The US, the World Bank, and the power of numbers’, New Political Economy, 15:4 (2010), pp. 473–492CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Stern, Nicholas, ‘The economics of climate change’, American Economic Review, 98:2 (2008), pp. 1–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stiglitz, Joseph, Sen, Armatya, and Fitoussi, Jean-Paul, Report by the Committee on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (Paris: INSEE, 2009)Google Scholar. More recently, see Fioramonti, How Numbers Rule the World; Fioramonti, ‘A post-GDP world’.

¹² Broome and Quirk, ‘Governing the world at a distance’.

¹³ Waring, Marilyn, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Pujol, Michèle, ‘Into the margin’, in Edith Kuiper and Jolande Sap (eds), Out of the Margin: Feminist Perspectives on Economics (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 17–34Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Gabay classifies the body of scholarship adopting this stand on the MDGs as ‘the reductionists’. Gabay, Clive, ‘The Millennium Development Goals and ambitious developmental engineering’, Third World Quarterly, 33:7 (2012), pp. 1253–1254CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Particular works singled out by Gabay include Saith, Ashwani, ‘From universal values to Millennium Development Goals: Lost in transition’, Development and Change, 37:6 (2006), pp. 1167–1199CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Antrobus, Peggy, ‘MDGs: Most Distracting Gimmicks’, Convergence, 38:3 (2005), pp. 49–52Google Scholar; Amin, Samir, ‘The Millennium Development Goals: a critique from the South’, Monthly Review, 57:10 (2006), pp. 1–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, Yamin, Alicia Ely, and Greenstein, Joshua, ‘The power of numbers: a critical review of Millennium Development Goal targets for human development and human rights, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 15:3 (2014), pp. 105–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sen, Gita and Mukherjee, Avanti, ‘No empowerment without rights, no rights without politics: Gender-equality, MDGs and the post-2015 development agenda’, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 15:3 (2014), pp. 188–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Broome and Quirk, ‘Governing the world at a distance’.

¹⁶ Please see Broome and Quirk, ‘Governing the world at a distance’; Harrison and Sekalala, ‘Addressing the compliance gap?’; Homolar, ‘Human security benchmarks’; Kuzemko, ‘Climate change benchmarking’; LeBaron and Lister, ‘Benchmarking global supply chains’; Porter, ‘Global benchmarking networks’; Seabrooke and Wigan, ‘How activists use benchmarks’; Sending and Lie, , ‘The limits of global authority’: all of the articles listed here in Review of International Studies, 41:5 (2015), pp. 813–1010Google Scholar. Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, ‘Global goals as a policy tool: Intended and unintended consequences’, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 15:3 (2014), pp. 118–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ It is suggested by Rhodes that by acknowledging an iterative relationship to exist between conceptual clarification and empirical investigation, ‘organising perspectives’ can be established to guide our understanding of the social world. See Rhodes, Rod, ‘From marketisation to diplomacy: It’s the mix that matters’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 56:2 (1997), pp. 40–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this study, an initial review of interactions highlighted the prevalence of blame shifting in MDG review summits, and prompted the subsequent drawing together of the work of Christopher Hood and others on this topic with other literatures on the politics of global benchmarking.

¹⁸ Across the field of International Studies, much literature has sought to analytically and empirically cut between behavioural change associated with these ‘logic of consequence’ – and ‘logic of approrpiateness’ – based drivers. See, for example, March, James and Olsen, Johan, ‘Institutional perspectives on political institutions’, Governance, 9:3 (1996), pp. 247–264CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Müller, Harald, ‘Arguing, bargaining, and all that: Communicative action, rationalist theory, and the logic of appropriateness in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 10:3 (2004), pp. 395–435CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These issues are not directly explored in this article, although there is an implicit assumption that, at different times and in different contexts, changes in behaviour brought about by benchmarking interventions can be mediated through either form of causal pathway.

¹⁹ Hood, Christopher, The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-Preservation in Government (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Hood, Christopher, ‘What happens when transparency meets blame-avoidance?’, Public Management Review, 9:2 (2007), pp. 191–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Earlier work on the politics of blame include McGraw, Kathleen, ‘Avoiding blame: an experimental investigation of political excuses and justifications’, British Journal of Political Science, 20:1 (1990), pp. 119–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGraw, Kathleen and Hubbard, Clark, ‘Some of the people some of the time: Individual differences in acceptance of political accounts’, in Diana Mutz, Paul Sniderman, and Richard Brody (eds), Political Persuasion and Attitude Change (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 145–170Google Scholar.

²⁰ Although he rarely uses the terms ‘benchmark’ and ‘benchmarking’, significant aspects of Hood’s work reflects on interactions that are in nature similar to those focused on by Broome and Quirk. Hood’s favoured terminology for benchmark-like structures is ‘synecdoche’, which refers to the proxy measurement that is used to gauge performance as a whole. See Bevan, Gwyn and Hood, Christopher, ‘What’s measured is what matters: Targets and gaming in the English public health care system’, Public Administration, 84:3 (2006), pp. 520–521CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Dunleavy, Patrick, Margetts, Helen, Bastow, Simon, and Tinkler, Jane, ‘New public management is dead – long live digital-era governance’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 16:3 (2006), pp. 467–494CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lorenz, Chris, ‘If you're so smart, why are you under surveillance? Universities, neoliberalism, and new public management’, Critical Inquiry, 38:3 (2012), pp. 599–629CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² For an overview of this transformation, see Toye, John, ‘Changing perspectives in development economics’, in Ha-Joon Chang (ed.), Rethinking Development Economics (London: Anthem, 2003), pp. 21–40Google Scholar. In a similar vein, Jacqueline Best’s recent work on transformations in development practice suggests that the increased preoccupation with managing risk and benchmarking performance has been driven by a growing preoccupation with policy failure through the 1990s. See Best, Jacqueline, Governing Failure: Provisional Expertise and the Transformation of Development Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Patterns of stability and change in actors’ perceptions in this regard are explored in Preston, Thomas, ‘Weathering the politics of responsibility and blame’, in Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell, and Paul Hart (eds), Governing after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability and Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 33–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ McGraw, ‘Avoiding blame’.

²⁵ For detailed exploration of scapegoating and the IMF, see Vreeland, James, The IMF and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ See, for example, Cooper, Frederick and Packard, Randall (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Interestingly, it seems that other attempts to benchmark the ‘big picture’ of development achievements have sought to embed more precisely delineated lines of responsibility than occurred with the MDGs. The 2005 Paris Declaration and its later Accra and Busan manifestations, for example, consciously aimed to adopt this more precise mode. In contrast to the MDGs, where the reluctance of the framework’s closed team of architects to scare state representatives away from the benchmarking system led them to avoid imposing clear lines of responsibility, the Paris and later declarations were the product of more open drafting processes with more direct state representative involvement. See Wood, Bernard, Kabell, Dorte, Muwanga, Nansozi, and Sagasti, Francisco, Evaluation of the Implementation of the Paris Declaration (Paris: OECD, 2005)Google Scholar. Thanks to the Review of International Studies anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to these points of comparison.

²⁸ Hood, Christopher, ‘Public service managerialism: Onwards and upwards, or “trobriand cricket” again?’, The Political Quarterly, 72:3 (2001), pp. 300–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similar dynamics are explored in Clift, Ben and Tomlinson, Jim, ‘Whatever happened to the balance of payments “problem”? The contingent (re)construction of British economic performance assessment’, British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 10:4 (2008), p. 607–629CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Several studies have explored the way in which the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment has been invoked in this manner. See Dixon, Ruth, Arndt, Christiane, Mullers, Manuel, Vakkuri, Jarmo, Engblom-Pelkkala, Kristina, and Hood, Christopher, ‘A lever for improvement or a magnet for blame? Press and political responses to international educational rankings in four EU countries’, Public Administration, 91:2 (2013), pp. 484–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ringarp, Johanna and Rothland, Martin, ‘Is the grass always greener? The effect of the PISA results on education debates in Sweden and Germany’, European Educational Research Journal, 9:3 (2010), pp. 422–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more general reflections on this form of blame shifting, see Christopher Hood, The Blame Game, pp. 67–89.

³⁰ 75 of these were delivered by state representatives, eight from representatives of non-governmental organisations, and three from representatives of inter-governmental organisations.

³¹ Single counting was used in order to enhance the comparability of the data collected; had multiple counting been used to track each of the suggested areas of reform, noise from representatives with wide-ranging agendas would have effectively drowned out the more focused contributions. For discussion of the operationalisation of quantitative coding techniques, see Auerbach, Carl and Silverstein, Louise, Qualitative Data: An Introduction to Coding and Analysis (New York: New York University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

³² The selected countries used in this study (and the year in which the PRSP was published) are: Bangladesh (2012), Burundi (2006), Cambodia (2005), Ethiopia (2005), Kenya (2004), Liberia (2008), Madagascar (2007), Malawi (2012), Rwanda (2007), Sierra Leone (2005), Tajikistan (2009), and Uganda (2010).

³³ Indeed, PRSPs were used by Fukuda-Parr when assessing the extent to which the MDGs had been disseminated across developing country governments. See Fukuda-Parr, ‘Are the MDGs a priority?’. In order to gauge the extent to which (aspects of) the MDG framework have been incorporated into the overarching developmental vision these PRSPs, I have concentrated analysis on the Executive Summary or equivalent section. These sections typically run to between fifteen and twenty pages in length.

³⁴ Fukuda-Parr, ‘Are the MDGs a priority?’. The extension relates to the chronological coverage and individual cases reviewed.

³⁵ Bergh, Gina, Foresti, Marta, Menocal, Alina Rocha, and Wild, Leni, Building Governance into a Post-2015 Framework: Exploring Transparency and Accountability as an Entry Point (London: Overseas Development Institute, 2012)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Wade, Robert Hunter, ‘US hegemony and the World Bank: the battle over people and ideas’, Review of International Political Economy, 9:2 (2002), pp. 215–243CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ The information about drafting processes was provided by a former member of staff from the UN Habitat programme, in a May 2012 interview with the author. A similar account is provided by Fukuda-Parr and Hulme, ‘International norm dynamics’.

³⁸ UN, Millennium Declaration (New York: UN, 2000).

³⁹ For a comprehensive review of contributions to the Millennium Summit, see Glenn, Jerome, Florescu, Elizabeth, and Gordon, Theodore, Analysis of United Nations Millennium Summit Speeches (Georgia: Army Environment Policy Institute, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ The following narrative account draws together insights put forward in Hulme and Scott, ‘Political economy of the MDGs’; Fukuda-Parr and Hulme, ‘International norm dynamics’; and Kwon, Huck-Ju and Kim, Eunju, ‘Poverty reduction and good governance: Examining the rationale of the Millennium Development Goals’, Development and Change, ifirst (2014), pp. 1–23Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Von Bogdandy, and Goldmann, , ‘International public authority’, pp. 77–78Google Scholar.

⁴² Such noting represents a lower-order form of acceptance than ‘approval’, which requires a positive vote. Fukuda-Parr and Hulme, ‘International norm dynamics’, p. 26.

⁴³ UN, Implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration (New York: UN, 2002), p. 8.

⁴⁴ Fukuda-Parr and Hulme, ‘International norm dynamics’, p. 29.

⁴⁵ The situation is succinctly summarised by John McArthur, who in a recent evaluation noted that ‘[t]he MDGs were not born with a plan, a budget, or a specific mapping out of responsibilities … No single individual or organization is responsible for achieving the MDGs.’ McArthur, ‘Own the goals’, p. 154.

⁴⁶ These issues are identified by Mark Malloch-Brown, who led the UNDP throughout this period, as having played a major role in holding back the progress of the MDG initiative. Malloch-Brown, Mark, The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Limits of Nations and the Pursuit of a New Politics (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 162–170Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Bissio, Roberto, ‘Civil society and the MDGs’, Development Policy Journal, 3:1 (2003), pp. 151–160Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, National Strategy for Accelerated Poverty Reduction (Dhaka: National Planning Commission, 2012), p. i.

⁴⁹ Government of the Republic of Kenya, Investment Programme for the Economic Recovery Strategy and Employment Creation (Nairobi: Government of the Republic of Kenya, 2004), p. 1.

⁵⁰ Government of the Republic of Tajikistan, Poverty Reduction Strategy (Dushanbe: Government of the Republic of Tajikistan, 2009), p. 30.

⁵¹ Royal Government of Cambodia, Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (Phnom Penh: Royal Government of Cambodia, 2006).

⁵² In total, 44 indicators are associated with Goals One to Seven of the MDGs, which are the aspects of the framework that relate to developing country outcomes. As such, even the best performing PRSPs display only a modest level of engagement in absolute terms.

⁵³ Government of the Republic of Liberia, Poverty Reduction Strategy (Monrovia: Government of the Republic of Liberia, 2008), p. 13.

⁵⁴ Kwon, and Kim, , ‘Poverty reduction and good governance’, pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Goal Five had a prevalence rate of under 10 per cent: from a potential 72 appearances, the six associated indicators were mentioned on just seven occasions.

⁵⁶ Goal Seven had a prevalence rate of 15 per cent: from a potential 120 appearances, the ten associated indicators were mentioned on just 18 occasions.

⁵⁷ Goals One to Seven, which are the aspects of the MDG framework that relate to developing country outcomes, contain 44 associated targets and indicators. Across the 12 examined PRSPs, a 100 per cent prevalence rate would have required a total count of 528; the actual count of 86 equates to a prevalence rate of 16 per cent.

⁵⁸ Hamad Al-Thani, ‘Statement from the State of Qatar at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 2.

⁵⁹ Haim Divon, ‘Statement from the State of Israel at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 1.

⁶⁰ Julie Bishop, ‘Statement from the State of Australia at the Special Event of the United Nations Towards Achieving the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2013, p. 1.

⁶¹ Of the 87 statements reviewed, 13 did not include a clear call for the MDG framework to be extended or refocused.

⁶² For a detailed history of this target, see Clemens, Michael and Moss, Todd, ‘Ghost of 0.7%: Origins and relevance of the international aid target’, International Journal of Development Issues, 6:1 (2007), pp. 3–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The evolution of the target within the UN can be traced back to the beginning of the first Decade of Development, and the General Assembly resolutions 1522 and 1711 of 1960 and 1961 respectively. These resolutions initially set the target at 1 per cent. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for directing my attention to these roots.

⁶³ Palaniappan Chidambaram, ‘Statement from the Government of India at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 2.

⁶⁴ Frank Bainimarama, ‘Statement from the Republic of Fiji at the Special Event of the United Nations Towards Achieving the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2013, p. 1.

⁶⁵ Bradford Machila, ‘Statement from the Zambian Delegation at the Special Event of the United Nations Towards Achieving the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 2.

⁶⁶ Arsenio Balisacan, ‘Statement from the Government of the Philippines at the Special Event of the United Nations Towards Achieving the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2013, p. 2; Wang Yi, ‘Statement from the People’s Republic of China at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 5; Nancy Birdsall, ‘Statement from Center for Global Development at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 2; Celestino Migliore, ‘Statement from the Holy See at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 1.

⁶⁷ It is particularly interesting that China and India feature within this grouping, given that these states are increasingly major donors. More fine-grained analysis is required of the motivations behind these two particular interventions. While it remains plausible that this represents a case of blame avoidance through push-based strategic clarification, it is possible that other dynamics are at play. In aggregate, the interventions from the developing country grouping in UN review summits fall more straightforwardly under the rubric of push-based strategic clarification.

⁶⁸ For reviews of the embedding of this focus, see Weaver, Hypocrisy Trap; Clegg, Liam, ‘The governance of the World Bank’, in Tony Payne and Nicola Phillips (eds), Handbook of the International Political Economy of Governance (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014), pp. 259–274Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Henrietta Fore, ‘Statement from the Government of the United States at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 2.

⁷⁰ Ryszard Schnepf, ‘Statement from the Republic of Poland at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 4.

⁷¹ Fredrick Reinfeldt, ‘Statement from the Government of Sweden at the Special Event of the United Nations Towards Achieving the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2013, p. 3.

⁷² Indeed, there was notable resistance from other non-OECD members to such an extension. See Wen Jiabao, ‘Statement from the People’s Republic of China at the High-Level Event of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals’, UN General Assembly Hall, 25 September 2008, p. 3; Yi, ‘Special event’, p. 4.

⁷³ Robert Wade, ‘Current Thinking About Global Trade Policy’, International Development at the LSE Blog (2013), available at: {http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/internationaldevelopment/2013/12/19/current-thinking-about-global-trade-policy/} accessed 21 April 2014.

⁷⁴ States were arranged into constituency groupings of between one and four members, with each grouping selecting a representative. For details of these groupings see UN Official Website, available at: {http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/67/L.48/Rev.1&Lang=E} accessed 22 August 2014.

⁷⁵ For the complete listing of these outcomes, see UN Sustainable Development Goals Official Website, available at: {http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/4518SDGs_FINAL_Proposal%20of%20OWG_19%20July%20at%201320hrsver3.pdf} accessed 22 August 2014. The document was reviewed at the close of the 68^th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014. Final confirmation of the list of targets and indicators associated with the Sustainable Development Goals will be confirmed in September 2015.

⁷⁶ The only OECD country submission to the global partnership-focused section of the Open Working Group came failed to mention this target. See UN Sustainable Development Goals Official Website, available at: {http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?menu=1680} accessed 18 February 2014.

⁷⁷ Compare, for example, the statement delivered on behalf of China, Indonesia, and Kazakhstan, with those from Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK, Canada, Israel, and the US, and France, Germany, and Switzerland. See the Sustainable Development Goals Official Website, available at: {https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/sdgs/group8} accessed 22 August 2014.

⁷⁸ See UN Sustainable Development Goals Official Website, available at: {http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/4518SDGs_FINAL_Proposal%20of%20OWG_19%20July%20at%201320hrsver3.pdf} accessed 22 August 2014.

⁷⁹ As outlined earlier in the article, this point of critique is most readily applicable to the ‘reductionist’ literature highlighted in Gabay, ‘The Millennium Development Goals’, pp. 1253–4.