The Sustainable Development Goals and Multilateral

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

Millennium Development Goals were not based on a widely carried, formal decision by the UN General Assembly, but developed rather by the UN Secretariat in the context of the Millennium Summit, even though drawing on previous intergovernmental conferences, consultations within and beyond the UN system, and inputs from governments.

There are both positive and negative lessons the experience of the Millennium Development Goals can offer. On the positive side, the Millennium Development Goals successfully mobilized support and brought attention to important but otherwise neglected global issues and communicated them in a concise and easily understandable way. Improvements related to the Millennium Development Goals include significantly reducing levels of extreme poverty, gender disparity in primary education, and gender inequality more generally. Other improvements included reductions in malaria-related diseases, improved access to clean drinking water, and mobilization of financial resources consistent with Millennium Development Goal 8, the “global partnership for development.”

Nonetheless, the Millennium Development Goals have faced a number of criticisms. Chapters 6–8 of this volume evaluate some of these critiques. Some criticisms include gaps in levels of achievement among goals and among regions. They also failed to clearly articulate linkages between global goals and national or local goals and priorities. Part of the reason is that, by design, the UN Secretariat set the Millennium Development Goals at the global level, which had the effect of focusing attention on aggregate measures of progress. These aggregate measures did not necessarily help direct attention or resources to specific needs and demands at the national or local levels (Sumner 2009; Shepherd 2008; Browne 2014). Paradoxically, the ability to measure the success of the Millennium Development Goals against numerical benchmarks may have inhibited the ability of the Sustainable Development Goals to do the same. Indeed, the final form of the Sustainable Development Goals reflects repeated concerns raised in negotiations around a “one-size-fits-all” approach by frequently emphasizing the importance of country ownership, disaggregated data and measurement, consideration of different national and local capabilities and circumstances, and encouragement to formulate targets at the national level as well as leaving possibilities to create supplemental indicators at the national level.

Another set of criticisms concerns the lack of inclusiveness of the Millennium Development Goals. They mainly focused on three broad sets of issues from the Millennium Declaration: “development and poverty eradication,” “protecting our common environment,” and “meeting the special