The MDGs arose as a counter-blast to the perceived failure of the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda – the one favouring markets, the private sector, and globalisation – to deliver for the world’s poor.

Richard Heeks
Development Informatics Group
University of Manchester, UK
richard.heeks@man.ac.uk

The purpose of this article is to prompt some questioning of current “e-Development” priorities. We have too readily assumed that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) must be the priority for application of ICTs. Yet the MDGs themselves can be challenged, as can the relevance of applying ICTs to those goals. This article will argue that we ought at least to be considering some different priorities if we want to make most effective use of the opportunities that new technology affords.

Questioning the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Setting up of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the UN is an attempt to directly address fundamental injustices and inequities that currently blight our planet. It will be fallacious to assume that like Mother Teresa, MDGs are on the side of the angels, and we should follow their lead without questioning them. It might be true that their hearts are in the right place but development should be guided more by the head than by the heart, and we certainly have the right to question these goals.

We can firstly question them from a political angle. The MDGs arose as a counter-blast to the perceived failure of the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda – the one favouring markets, the private sector, and globalisation – to deliver for the world’s poor. Yet the new agenda falls into many of the same traps as the old one.

Neo-liberalism was accused of being ‘hegemonic’: of imposing a one-size-fits-all model that allowed no deviations from orthodoxy. But the new approach does just the same, forcing policies through the MDG filter and hammering them hard until they pass through. Where is the flexibility? Where is the consideration that there might be alternative, even better, paths to development

Neo-liberalism was also accused of being an invention of the North, imposed on the South by international agencies. Isn’t that exactly true of the MDGs as well? Developing nations have been dragged from one Northern-inspired orthodoxy to the next: a state agenda in the 1960s and 1970s; a private sector agenda in the 1980s and 1990s; and now an NGO agenda in the 2000s. Where is the breathing space and support for countries to construct their own agendas?

We can secondly question the MDGs from a practical angle. Take a historical perspective and point out which of the rich, industrialised nations got rich and industrialised by placing MDG-type goals at the heart of their development strategies. Can you find them? I doubt it. My adopted hometown – Manchester – was the original laboratory, the original motor for the dramatic change of the industrialisation process. It catalysed England’s transformation from a relatively poor agricultural economy to a relatively rich developed economy; much the same transformation that so many developing countries today seek to achieve. But this change was not achieved by poverty-friendly policies, but, through an often unpleasant and unruly dash for wealth. Of course, philanthropy and social development played their part, but as after-effects of the transformation, not its driving forces.