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Norichika Kanie, Steven Bernstein, Frank Biermann, and Peter M. Haas
governments, international organizations, partnerships, action networks, and nonstate actors. The Millennium Development Goals as Precursor Broadly around the 2002 Johannesburg Summit, governments agreed also on the Millennium Development Goals, which are widely seen as one precursor to the current Sustainable Development Goals. The Millennium Development Goals were the result of a process that started in the 1990s, originally aiming at making development assistance more effective. At that time, international goals on development were agreed on in a number of conferences by the UN and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, some of which were eventually consolidated in the list of eight Millennium Development Goals, with originally 18 targets and 48 indicators, published in September 2001 in an annex to a “road map” produced by the UN Secretary-General. This road map stood in the broader context of the 2000 UN Millennium Declaration, which had already incorporated a number of specific targets (Manning 2010; Jabbour et al. 2012; Loewe 2012). The Millennium Development Goals were meant to guide global and national policies in the period toward 2015. In 2005, the list was expanded, with eventually 21 targets and 60 indicators, based on the work of an interagency and expert group (Manning 2010). The Millennium Development Goals were significantly more limited than the new Sustainable Development Goals. They covered only a part of the sustainable development agenda, namely to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; to achieve universal primary education; to promote gender equality and empower women; to reduce child mortality; to improve maternal health; to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; to ensure environmental sustainability; and this all by developing a global partnership for development. Environmental concerns and questions of planetary stability—now much more central in the Sustainable Development Goals— were addressed merely in the seventh goal. This goal was specified in four targets on reversing natural resource degradation, reducing biodiversity loss, increasing access to safe drinking water and sanitation, and improving the lives of slum dwellers. Unlike the current Sustainable Development Goals, the Millennium Development Goals essentially addressed developing countries only, with industrialized countries being involved mainly as funders of multilateral and national development agencies (addressed thus only in Millennium Development Goal 8, the global partnership for development). Also, the
