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Meeting the Challenge | ||||||||||||||||||||
| MDGs |
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| 1 | Poverty and Hunger |
| 2 | Education |
| 3 | Gender Equality |
| 4 | Child Mortality |
| 5 | Maternal Health |
| 6 | HIV/AIDS |
| 7 | Environment |
| 8 | Global Partnership |
When 147 countries became signatories to the Millennium Declaration, they entered into a social contract with one another—but the Declaration is no ordinary contract. Though not legally binding, it constitutes “soft law,” a moral imperative for the signatories to act on the promises they made to help refocus global attention, energy, and resources to reduce by 2015—or, in some cases, 2020—the suffering of nearly 2 billion people who are affected by malnutrition, disease, and premature death. Of course, grinding poverty has withstood the grand eloquence of past declarations. In 1974, for instance, Henry Kissinger, then the United States’ Secretary of State, famously declared that by 1984 no child, woman, or man would ever go to bed hungry. Three decades later, Kissinger’s promise remains grossly unfulfilled. At the same time history also demonstrates that when the world has united in addressing a particular scourge, it can succeed in eliminating it altogether as the cases of smallpox and polio eradication show.
TRAPPED Landless sharecroppers are often caught in a vicious cycle that robs them of their liberty
The Declaration, while echoing past promises and commitments, is unprecedented in its nature, scope, and specificity. Its eight objectives have measurable outcomes, time lines for achievements, and clear indicators for monitoring progress.
The Declaration calls for changes in the norms that govern societies: it calls for a fundamental reorientation of legal and institutional arrangements and priorities at national and global levels.
To fulfill the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the poor must find new and better opportunities for their livelihoods. Provision of basic social services, such as health care, water and sanitation, and education must also be expanded and improved. Economic growth must enable the poor to engage in the process and benefit from it without devouring the natural resource endowments on which the prospects of our future generations depend.
An effective legal framework for the accountability of public institutions and a capacity of citizens to assert their legal rights are minimum requirements for the sustainability of the MDGs. Public institutions must have the capacity to deliver appropriate services and assist people in identifying their needs and priorities.
Poor governance, corruption, and lack of accountability forestall development. Legal and institutional reforms will help create conditions for active citizenship so the poor have access to information to enable them to understand and secure their rights.
By increasing accountability, public institutions will become more transparent in their operations, enabling citizens to understand how resources are used and decisions made, and providing clearer avenues for grievance resolution. Active citizenship implies a legal framework that enables citizens to effectively articulate their views.
The state must address insecurity and vulnerability of its citizens, especially the poor, by using its monopoly over the security apparatus. It must guard against abuse of power by state functionaries, and strengthen law and order while making the police and judiciary more accountable.
ADB is playing a role in this through, for example, its assistance to Pakistan’s Access to Justice Program, which supports an increase in budgetary expenditure on the police and judiciary while seeking more transparency in accountability of these institutions.
While the MDGs are universal, no single approach is likely to be effective everywhere
In 2000, an ADB-commissioned study examined how legal empowerment contributes to good governance, poverty reduction, and other MDGs. It showed that legal empowerment increases the ability of the poor to play a more informed role in local decision making to advance their rights and interests. It also showed that the heightened public interest and expectations that can result from legal empowerment can have a catalytic impact in goading public institutions to be more responsive and accountable to the needs and rights of the poor.
ADB studies have confirmed that gender disparities are acute in Asia. Legal and constitutional safeguards against discrimination, while not guaranteeing protection, can be a significant first step toward reform.
Already, India and Pakistan have set aside reserved seats for women in national and local governments. Bangladesh is also contemplating reintroducing such a measure for elections to the national parliament. Afghanistan’s new constitution envisages the reservation of seats for women.
Most of Asia’s poor depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Access to land and landownership is critical to the economic empowerment of the rural poor. Without such access, the rural poor have difficulty gaining credit at reasonable terms. An example of the consequences of this can be seen in the case of bonded laborers in Pakistan, in the province of Sindh, where landless sharecroppers are caught in a vicious cycle that robs them of their liberty.
ADB assistance to the Government of Pakistan through a loan for the Sindh Rural Development Project is helping address the plight of bonded laborers by, among others, raising legal awareness and independent transaction monitoring of debts that ultimately forces a laborer into a bonded state. In Cambodia, much of the nation’s land remains unregistered, rendering it unavailable as collateral for obtaining credit. ADB has been collaborating with the Government of Cambodia to establish a legal system with respect to landownership and land rights, including access to credit by mortgaging land.
ADB research has pioneered an integrated approach to insolvency and secured transaction law reform to ensure that insolvency reforms support secured lending and contribute to a more predictable debtorcreditor legal regime.
While changes in a nation’s domestic policies, laws, and institutional norms are crucial, changes in the global framework are also necessary. Trade and nontrade barriers, particularly concerning agricultural products, still challenge many developing countries trying to break into the consumer markets of high-income countries. Although tariff structures are often favorable to developing countries, particularly under preferential access arrangements, such as the Generalized System of Preferences and the European Union’s Everything but Arms initiative, tariffs for some products escalate at certain quota volumes.
Often the products affected are those over which low- and middle-income countries have a comparative advantage, such as textiles. For example, Bangladesh’s main export is ready-made garments. The industry employs almost two million women for whom there are limited alternative livelihood opportunities. The tariff charged by the United States on Bangladesh’s $2 billion of mostly textile exports is higher than the tariff charged to France for its $30 billion of exports. An international trade regime supportive of the MDGs ought to eliminate such distortions of trade.
While the MDGs are universal, no single approach is likely to be effective everywhere. Each country must develop its own framework for catalyzing diverse local processes that will ultimately yield the best results. The MDGs call for global priorities to be aligned in a way that can dramatically reduce the deprivation suffered by poor people. However, the goals can only be achieved and sustained when the policies, laws, and institutions implicated in this effort are also aligned to meet this challenge. Without such a holistic approach, risk exists that targets set by the Millennium Declaration may be met without addressing the structural issues that ultimately will determine the durability of such success. Here the stakes are indeed high.
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