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Issue 20: October 2002

COMMENT

Is setting targets for Summit goals wise?

By Mark McGillivray

There was much talk about goals and targets at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. To this extent it was like many other conferences in which national governments and UN agencies have been involved. At the 2000 Millennium Summit, for example, governments committed themselves to the goal of reducing poverty, and set a corresponding target of reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by one half by the year 2015. Among the goals considered at the Summit is to double the number of people with access by 2015.

But is the adoption of precise targets a good thing? It is to the extent to which it gives governments something concrete to aim for, but there are at least five reasons why targets, or their proposal, can be dangerous.

The first is that statistics on which targets are assessed are notoriously unreliable. There is a real danger that many countries will be judged to have achieved a target, when in fact they will have not owing to errors in the statistics in which this judgement is based.

The second is that setting a precise target is only really valid conceptually if over-achieving a target is necessarily a bad thing. What we want is the best possible progress. Why stop at a particular level of achievement, especially when further achievement is possible? Of course no one is saying that governments will stop attempting to, say, increasing access to water. But achievement of a target takes pressure off governments for further progress, irrespective of whether such progress is possible.

The third is that targets can give governments who might not want to commit to a broader goal a reason to reject, or water down the goal itself. The United States, Canada and Australia have, for example, to date refused to embrace certain targets and negotiations have turned to the target and away from appropriate policies for improving the condition of the world.

This leads us to the fourth reason, and that is that debate about a particular target takes attention away from the most important issue, which is the policies which give maximum achievement in the general area identified by the goal. For example, let’s not talk about reducing world poverty by half, but about policies which give maximum possible reductions on the number of people living in poverty.

The fifth reason why the notion of targets can be counterproductive relates to the reasons why a goal may or may not be achieved. There are a number of reasons why targets can be met, and some of them have little to do with government policy. A government can be praised for achieving a target when its policies had nothing to do with its achievement, or worse still a government can be criticised for not achieving a target when it had done everything possible to achieve it.

We should focus on firstly getting support in principle for a particular goal (such as providing universal access to clean water), and secondly on policies which will provide the best possible progress towards the goal. 

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