The new economics of development:
from below, starting with the family
by Maria Sophia Aguirre
by Maria Sophia Aguirre
Pouring money in at the top, controlling life at its source, is so last century.
At the end of this year the 15-year period for achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG) will run out and the UN will launch a new 15-year plan for development. The focus of the current programme has been reducing poverty and there has been progress on this front although one billion of world’s seven billion people still live in extreme poverty.
However, the next set of goals will focus on sustainable development – a term coined in the late 1980s and formally adopted by the UN at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The idea then was that development should not happen in a way that destroyed the environment for future generations, and the way to ensure this was to renew efforts to control population growth. The UN women’s conference at Beijing in 1995 gave this old campaign the new name of “women’s reproductive health”.
In other words, there were new terms but the approach did not change, not even with the MDGs. It is assumed to this day by the UN, the World Bank and its academic and activist partners that population growth is the cause of poverty and that controlling it is one side of a grand bargain with the governments of developing countries. The other side is that the rich world will give them money for economic development and not ask too many questions about how it is spent.
However, the winds of change are blowing through the development community, and they have been stirred up mainly by economists in the United States.
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Read more: www.mercatornet.com
At the end of this year the 15-year period for achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG) will run out and the UN will launch a new 15-year plan for development. The focus of the current programme has been reducing poverty and there has been progress on this front although one billion of world’s seven billion people still live in extreme poverty.
However, the next set of goals will focus on sustainable development – a term coined in the late 1980s and formally adopted by the UN at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The idea then was that development should not happen in a way that destroyed the environment for future generations, and the way to ensure this was to renew efforts to control population growth. The UN women’s conference at Beijing in 1995 gave this old campaign the new name of “women’s reproductive health”.
In other words, there were new terms but the approach did not change, not even with the MDGs. It is assumed to this day by the UN, the World Bank and its academic and activist partners that population growth is the cause of poverty and that controlling it is one side of a grand bargain with the governments of developing countries. The other side is that the rich world will give them money for economic development and not ask too many questions about how it is spent.
However, the winds of change are blowing through the development community, and they have been stirred up mainly by economists in the United States.
...................
Read more: www.mercatornet.com
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