The Millennium Development Goals: Who actually created them?

Guest blog: Lenni Montiel: Senior UN Development Leader (Ret.) | Former UN Assistant Secretary-General |UNDP Resident Representative | Governance, Public Policy & Multilateral Diplomacy | Leadership Advisor & Trainer | Chevening Scholar. Lenni writes on LinkedIn about the UN and international development. Originally published here.

The Millennium Development Goals changed international development.

But there is an interesting question behind them:
Who actually created the MDGs?

In September 2000, 189 Member States adopted the Millennium Declaration, General Assembly resolution 55/2.

It was a broad political declaration: peace and security, development and poverty, human rights, democracy and good governance, vulnerable people, Africa, and the environment.

The Declaration did not contain the familiar list of eight Millennium Development Goals as we later knew them. That framework emerged afterwards.

In 1996, the OECD Development Assistance Committee published Shaping the 21st Century, identifying a small group of measurable international development goals drawn from commitments agreed during the major UN conferences of the 1990s.

After that came the Millennium Summit.

In 2001, the Secretary-General issued the Road Map towards the Implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration.

Its annex translated parts of the larger Millennium Declaration into a concise framework of eight goals, 18 targets and 40 selected indicators.

That distinction matters.

The Millennium Declaration was negotiated and adopted by Member States. The operational MDG framework was subsequently assembled from that Declaration, earlier UN conference commitments and previous international development targets.

It was enormously effective.

Eight goals were much easier to communicate than decades of declarations, strategies and conference agreements.

Governments could measure progress. Development agencies could organize programmes around them. Donors could align financing. Civil society could require accountability.

For perhaps the first time, much of the international development system worked around the same short list of measurable global outcomes.

But the process also generated criticism.

Some argued the framework was too centralized and insufficiently negotiated with developing countries. Others considered it too donor-driven.

Translating a broad political declaration into a list of measurable indicators inevitably meant leaving things out: governance, human rights, peace and security, inequality, institutions, and productive transformation.

Even the balance of responsibilities was uneven.

Goals 1 to 7 focused mainly on outcomes to be achieved in developing countries. Goal 8, the global partnership for development, addressed aid, trade, debt, medicines and technology, but its commitments were generally less precise.

This was the political trade-off behind the MDGs:
Their simplicity was one of their greatest strengths.
It was also one of their greatest limitations.

The MDGs did not invent a new development agenda. They turned a broad one into a small number of measurable global commitments.

But development had never been only eight things.

An important lesson to begin designing the SDGs