The UN's Millennium Development Goals are achieving some results but we should recognise their limitations

The Guardian

I recently served as a UN regional officer monitoring progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). I learned to lose any sentimental attachment to the idea of "halving extreme poverty by 2015" and "eradicating hunger".

First, though, let me be clear: the world is a better place for MDGs, which stand as a unique moral commitment and make uncomfortably transparent the failures of advanced industrialism in redistributing wealth. As minimalist as they are, they are stretching political and economic capacities and holding governments properly to account. But let us not be seduced by their simplicity and populist appeal. Let us, rather, be realistic and place their ambitions in the contexts of their own limitations and the wider challenge.

The Millennium Declaration did not address structural and democratic deficits. There are no MDGs for good governance, citizens' rights, or levels of social investment; that was left to the Paris Declaration and other international agreements. The goals themselves were negotiated among and are "owned" by international political elites, not by the citizens and communities whose needs they serve – indeed, there is no goal for community empowerment.

As I was reminded this week by a senior figure in international policing, the MDGs say nothing about citizen safety – which, in a world of intensifying civil warfare and a plethora of post-conflict societies is a prerequisite to the alleviation of poverty – and inexplicably there is no MDG for child protection. The MDGs focus attention and scrutiny on the poor and those who aid them. They avoid any scrutiny of the rich and do not address the broader political contexts of aid and trade.