It was great fun to discuss the big questions in development economics with Prof. Dan Banik on his podcast In Pursuit of Development. Listen to it and read more about it here.
Category: SDGs
I had the pleasure and honour of debating ‘A New International Development Paradigm. Do the Sustainable Development Goals Drive Global Progress?’ with Dr. Fred Muhumuza (Makerere University) and Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai (University of Kassel) at the Online Summer Academy for Pluralist Economics, August 2020.
The blurb for the panel:
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations are considered a universal benchmark for development around the world. But is it realistic to have such a benchmark for countries/regions whose societies are structured within different local contexts? During this discussion, the panelists will share their perspectives on what development is, on the relevance of the SDGs, and on what a new development paradigm could look like in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I was invited by the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) to give a keynote on the political economy of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at their annual conference, which was organized in collaboration with the IAP Science for Poverty Eradication Committee. You can view the keynote presentation in the video above. Here is my presentation and here is a news article on the event (in Portuguese).
In English:
Can development goals help development finance? If so, how? (Righting Finance, October 20th, 2015)
In Norwegian:
Globale mål: Hvorfor, hvordan og for hvem? (Ny Tid, November 12th 2015)
FNs bærekraftsmål: Manglende kobling mellom mål og middel (Gjeldsbrevet, December 15th 2015)
In addition, there’s the FT article from this summer that I wrote with Sanjay Reddy on the same topic: Does the world really need development goals?
New School Professor Sanjay Reddy and are publishing our paper on global goals today. We raise some basic conceptual questions regarding global development goals: Why have them at all? What function, if any, might they serve, and under what conditions could they do so successfully? Based on our answers to these questions, we identify serious inadequacies in the contemporary approach to development goals and relate these to weaknesses in how the goals were conceived and formulated. Despite these failings, higher-level goals may play a useful role if the practical approach to them is embedded in a holistic and integrated vision of a better world. Focusing on goals rather than targets opens needed space for flexibility, innovation, and fuller democratic accountability.
Download the working paper here (SSRN) and read my blog post on the New School Economic Review here.
On August 28th 2015, Professor Sanjay Reddy and I published an op-ed on the Financial Times blog, BeyondBrics. In the op-ed we discuss the purpose of global development goals, as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are about to be adopted. Read a slightly extended version on Sanjay Reddy’s blog.
In the newest issue of the Norwegian magazine “Gjeldsbrevet”, Maria Dyveke Styve interviews me about the purpose of global goals and the impacts of the Millennium Development Goals. “Gjeldsbrevet,” is a bi-annual magazine produced by the Debt Justice Network, Norway.
Download the magazine (in Norwegian).
Professor Sanjay Reddy and I present our ongoing work on the purpose of global goals at the Development Thought and Policy Seminar at The New School.
Read more about the event on the Milano School website.
