The Post 2015 Development Agenda by Richard Jolly

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1 The Post 2015 Development Agenda by Richard Jolly It's both a privilege and a real pleasure to be here. I have followed Rolph's career -and indeed worked closely with him - in Zambia in 1970, in UNICEF in the late 1980s on adjustment with a human face and in the 1990s in the North-South Roundtable. After this I have followed his work with the ILO in the 1990s and afterwards with Juan Somavia and many others. For anyone interested in international development this is an impressive record -even more impressive because Rolph throughout has made use of and further developed his professional skills in this wide diversity of policyoriented assignments, especially in issues of employment but in others fare beyond. The UN needs more people like Rolph. My theme -and that of this whole valedictory seminar -is the future for development. I will argue that it needs to be framed by five fundamental objectives - universalism, sustainability, human development, inequality and human rights. All five are embodied in the SDGs, which I take to be an important advance as well as a formal political endorsement, internationally and nationally, even if not always with deep commitment, by the majority of the world's countries. I want to comment on three of these fundamentals - universalism, inequality and human development. Others will no doubt comment on sustainability and human rights -and no doubt add much more on inequality. First, universalism. This is a great advance. It removes the longstanding weakness of development - that it was us talking about the desirability of things happening in other people's countries. In my view, universalism does not mean a total change of content and agenda but a broadening of context and application. We will be more concerned, as Emanuel de Kadt once put it, with 1

2 "development in our own back yard". It will also mean, as Dudley Seers demonstrated in his own work during his last ten years, that development experts will use approaches and techniques developed in and for developing countries and apply them in and for developed countries. For some development specialists (though by no means all) universalism may also bring a welcome change of attitude -no longer lording it over others as experts but relating to those in policy positions in a more understanding way, recognising the social and political complications which often constrain doing what we experts think is obviously desirable. It may also help strengthen the political economy analysis of strategy and policy action. What might a more universal agenda for research and teaching mean? Bringing together analysis of development in so-called developing countries with analysis in so-called developed countries would broaden both approaches. It would bring more attention to comparative work in developed countries, with more attention to context and institutions and long run changes - and perhaps to the political economy of policy proposals. I am always surprised and somewhat appalled at the narrow national focus on economic policy debate in the UK, so focused on UK issues, so little on the experience and policy approaches of other European countries, let alone on countries beyond. Our booklet Be Outraged to which Rolph and several others here contributed analysed the problems of austerity in Europe today and for every policy alternative we suggested gave examples of that policy already being implemented in some developing country. Our message: the North now needs to learn from the South. For developing countries, and for our teaching in institutions like the ISS and the IDS, a universal approach would deal with one of the curious weaknesses of our teaching bringing students from the South to the North to learn about how to analyse problems and reach policy conclusions for their own countries in the South. IDS students complained about this on our MPhil course which Dudley 2

3 seers was teaching in the 1970s. His solution? Take the students to Scotland to help analyse what would be the consequences of the new discoveries of North-Sea oil. Dudley also got policy makers from Norway and Venezuela to share their experiences. The whole was written up as an IDS Discussion paper with the students as coauthors. I could go on but I hope the point has been made in a way which will encourage us all to consider other changes which a more universal agenda for development and analysis would bring. Inequality. After thirty years of virtual neglect in international economic policy- in spite of many calls for it to recognised as of major importance - inequality has at last been put centre stage, thanks especially to the work of Piketty and the econometric work of Berg and Ostry of the IMF. (It is interesting that it was another Berg, Eliot Berg, who did so much intellectual and policy damage for the World Bank in the 1980s with his over-simple and misleading recommendations under the title of Accelerating Development in Sub-Saharan Africa, including inequality keeping out of the analysis, just as it side-lined the Lagos Plan of Action.) But now the opportunity of working on inequality must not be missed, because the forces of reaction will not remain side-lined for long, even though the extremes of income inequality within countries are at unprecedented levels. Already the dramatic reductions of Gini coefficients in the majority of Latin America countries, as shown by Andrea Cornia and by Nora Lustig, are being reversed. Closer to home, the triumph of conservative governments in Europe, notably in Britain and the Netherlands among others, show the many ways in which right wing policies can be presented to appeal to electorates, especially in the case of Britain, by a right wing press. The work by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, is also an important reminder that inequality must be analysed in a multidimensional manner and brought into mainstream policy. The Spirit Level shows ten dimensions of well-being where inequality 3

4 has a major impact on mental illness, child and adult mortality, obesity, educational performance, teenage births, homicide, imprisonment rates, levels of trust and social mobility. Wilkinson increasingly believes that the common factor behind these many and widespread repercussions of inequality is stress -and a reminder that the future universal agenda of human development must encompass a wide range of multi-disciplinary work. Human Development. The human development paradigm for many of us has its own stimulating richness and subtleties. But it needs to be pursued within the framework of capabilities, functionings and choices as so brilliantly set out by Amartya Sen, now also backed up by many others like Martha Nussbaum, Des Gasper, Ingrid Robeyns and Sakiko Fukuda-Parr. The fact that some 140 countries have produced their own national human development reports is a further example of its widespread application. Yet some of us ask what is still missing? Why is it that HD is so rarely part of mainstream work, either in the teaching of development or as a frame for policy analysis and policy making, even among the UN agencies. As I have said on other occasions, UNDP itself loves the human development as a brilliant report which guarantees headlines once a year round the world. But UNDP rarely takes human development seriously as a frame for its own programmes, let alone as a frame for international policy or advocacy for humane global governance. For the ISS and indeed for the IDS and other development institutions, this respectful neglect of human development contains a clear message. We need to bring human development theory, techniques and applications - of human development into our development teaching as well as into our policy studies and consultancies. To me, this would an important step towards offsetting the narrow applications of neo-liberal economic teaching and policy making -and the narrowness of austerity policies being 4

5 promoted across Europe today. As Mahbub ul Haq put in in the 1992 HD Report, it is illogical and absurd to think that one can restore balance to a country's economy by unbalancing the lives of its people. Human development analysis would also be a frame for better considering the special problems of different categories of people, perhaps especially today of older people and how to strengthen their capabilities for the choices that make sense in their stages of life. Monitoring - Jan Tinbergen, a hero of humane development and professionalism for many of us, saw a central role for the UN in both setting goals and monitoring their achievement. He created the CDP, the Committee of Development Planning (now the Committee of Development Policy) as a forum of distinguished economists chosen for their personal professional standing apart from government representation. In my view, over its lifetime the CDP has made important contributions, in identifying key development challenges, proposing goals for the early development decades and, perhaps most notably, in bringing analytical content to the definition of least developed countries and independent judgement in assessing which countries fall into this category. (The UN's category of LDCs is much more meaningful than the Bank's category Less Developed Countries.) Most recently, the CDP, under the chairmanship of Jose Antonio Ocampo, has made important recommendations with respect to the SDGs - about the need for improved global governance and for a more relevant and robust system and approach for monitoring progress towards the SDGs over the next 15 years. The CDP has also underlined the importance of ensuring that the SDGs are adapted to the national context of each country with a process of democratic consultation involving civil society as well as national parliaments. There needs also to be national commitments and action to create an enabling environment for sustainable development worldwide. 5

6 All this will require an accountability framework which is inclusive, transparent, and participatory through a bottom-up process. States should make public their commitments and the CDP proposes that the UN Regional Commissions should organise a peer review process for regularly assessing progress. They add that the statistical priority is not to develop yet more international data systems but to strengthen national statistical offices and efforts. All this would feed into the global UN process, involving the new High Level Political Forum mandated by the General Assembly and the Economic Development Cooperation Forum of ECOSOC. The above agenda may be summarised in terms of its implications for development teaching and research in bodies like the ISS and IDS. I close with five priorities: 1. Universality -by a broadening of teaching and research to apply development thinking and research from developing countries to problems in the so-called developed counties - and vice versa. 2. More use of the paradigm of Human Development, including its applications to human security and humane global governance. 3. A wider multi-disciplinary application of work on inequality throughout the whole range of human development concerns, policies and actions. 4. Work on the SDGs in all countries, to support and assist the process of democratic priority setting at all levels of policy making and implementation. 5. And professional assistance in the processes of review, monitoring and accountability of the SDGs, especially by support of regional peer reviews of progress and summary assessments of progress to high level UN fora. 6

7 There will be more than enough work for development professionals in the future -and the shift of focus and broadening of coverage and development approaches will enliven and energise the next generation of committed development professionals. Rolph and others like him will still be needed to share their experience and help pioneer new approaches for the expanding tasks. 7