As the international community debates the elaboration of the International Development Agenda post-2015 and the Sustainable Development Goals, the future of development of cooperation is at stake.These debates mark shifts in consensus thinking about development as an international project, how the important objectives are defined, what key constraints are identified, and what strategies are considered as necessary to overcome constraints and achieve objectives.The Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) marked a departure in how development is defined by achieving a consensus on poverty as its primary, over-arching objective.This is an important achievement in advancing global commitment to human dignity.But as Charles Gore (2010) remarks, this new idea about development replaces an old idea about development.He warned that this could be a 'Faustian Bargain' where developing countries give up the idea of development as transforming the productive capacity of their national economies.Thus the MDGs mark a major departure from the idea of development as economic transformation that underpinned the post-war framework for international cooperation as support to developing countries to become economically self-sustaining, and around which arrangements for resource transfers and other types of support were developed, including specific arrangements for development aid, trade agreements, debt relief, and capacity building.The focus on poverty is not only new but reframes the architecture of these global economic arrangements.Such shifts in thinking can have fundamental implications for economic and political relations between the rich and poor countries of the world.This paper explores the implications of these shifts in thinking.It first examines how consensus ideas about development-the MDGs in this case-can exert influence on national and international policy priorities and identifies two mechanisms, through setting standards forWorking paper prepared for JICA/IPD Africa Task Force Meeting Yokohama, Japan, June 2-3, 2013 2 performance and resource allocation, and through creating a narrative.The paper then contrasts the MDG consensus framing of development with earlier conceptions of development in the way that it articulates a motivation as a political priority, identifies key problems, objectives, and unit of analysis.Finally, the paper then examines how priorities of national governments and donors have shifted since 2000.
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (Mon,) studied this question.