Publication Details

The MDGs as an institution of hope

Alastair Greig
Mark Turner
2010

Abstract

The MDGs are contentious. There are many opinions strung out along a continuum from ardent support to strong criticism and outright rejection. Controversy over the MDGs has tended to focus on issues such as the efficacy of planning or the value of setting quantitative targets. While these debates are necessary, in this paper we turn attention to how the MDGs have served another important, symbolic, function in development discourse. They have injected ‘hope’ into poverty eradication discourse. We argue that the MDGs, regardless of the conflicting claims surrounding their implementation, have reinvigorated ethical interest in development issues. Drawing on a series of interconnected articles by the US philosopher Richard Rorty during the 1990s, we emphasise the loss of ‘hope’ that prevailed in competing discourses of development during that era. We then suggest, using Braithwaite’s concept of ‘institutions of hope’, that the MDGs have performed an important symbolic role in generating support for programs and projects associated with poverty eradication. The paper begins with an outline of the hope generated by earlier developmental decades in the 1960s and the 1970s. It then introduces the context in which Rorty’s concerns over neo-liberalism and postdevelopment discourses on poverty eradication emerged and his fear of hope abandoned. The MDGs are then defined as an example of what Braithwaite 2004, 7) terms an authentic ‘institution of hope’: a set of ‘rules, norms and practices that ensure that we have some room not only to dream of the extraordinary but also do the extraordinary’. The value of this symbolic and institutional role is then explored through reinterpreting some of the debates between the supporters and critics of the MDGs.

We conclude that the MDGs are conceivably – but still provisionally - the ‘global policy’ that Rorty (1999c) hoped would act as a ‘plausible narrative of progress’ through which both the rich and poor world could imagine a future where the elimination of poverty could be achieved.

Publication Type(s)

Conference Paper

Ten Years of War Against Poverty Conference Papers

Conference: Ten Years of War Against Poverty

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