Geography and engagement with UN development goals

Introduction

I am grateful for, and honored by, this opportunity to comment on Professor Diana Liverman’s reflection on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of the aspects of Dr Liverman’s scholarship and service that I have long admired is her willingness to engage in policy debates and to work with international institutions (AAG, 2014). In many ways, she has been a role model who walks a path of international policy engagement established by other geographers such as Gilbert White, Robert Kates, and Anthony Bebbington. In her article in this issue, Liverman outlines some of the problems with development goals and then sketches out the potential contributions of a geographic perspective to debates over such goals. In the end, Liverman acknowledges the many problems with development goals and measures, but then argues that geographers need to participate in a discussion about this topic because development will be better for it. I largely agree with this sentiment, but also wonder whether this means walking into an intellectual cul-de-sac of sorts, that is, a debate where the parameters are too restrictively defined. The rest of this essay is divided into three parts: questioning the value of engaging with development metrics, the geographic perspective and development goals, and thoughts for moving forward.

Should we dance with development metrics?

I begin with a personal story which is relevant to a discussion of development goals and metrics. I spent a year of my life in 1997 working for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington, DC, where one of my major responsibilities was to help write the environmental section of that agency’s annual performance report (USAID, 1998). This report, and associated data collection effort, was part of Al Gore’s ‘Reinventing Government’ initiative when he was vice president for then President Bill Clinton (Kamensky, 1996). The guiding philosophy of this initiative was that one could use metrics to improve government performance. As such, for every USAID project around the world with an environmental component, there were goals, and progress against those goals was tracked via indicators. The results of this exercise were published in the agency’s annual performance report. While this exercise may have been about improving government performance, it was also about justifying the agency’s existence and showing that USAID was making a difference. Unfortunately, in my view, it was also the worst possible social science as there were huge attribution problems. USAID was claiming, for example, that small scattered projects were leading to significant changes in national statistics for deforestation, biodiversity conservation, and water use, when the actual causal connections were extremely tenuous at best. It was this exercise that led me to end a 10-year international development career.

I had spent the previous 9 years working for the Peace Corps, the World Bank, and the British non-governmental organization (NGO) Save the Children. It was at Save the Children where I started working with a bunch of British geographers on a hunger mapping project. Here I was exposed for the first time to geographic scholarship on environment and development, including books by Michael Watts (1983), Paul Richards (1985), and Piers Blaikie (1985). Their scholarship helped me understand development anew in the African context, including recognizing the insights of local farmers as well as the influence of colonialism, national policy, regional trading relationship, and international financial institutions. In contrast, USAID’s bean counting, cum assessment, exercise was frustratingly blind to political economy and often deeply misleading. So I packed up my bags and left. It was development goals and measurement that drove me out of the development business and into academic geography.

Given the above, it is somewhat ironic to now be reflecting on Dr Liverman’s paper on development goals. One of her central questions is: What do geographers have to contribute to a discussion about global development goals? Before reflecting further on this question, and Dr Liverman’s response, I should note that—while tempting—I have not given up on development as an intellectual project. For me, deprivation and inequality are real, and these are social problems that need to be addressed for moral reasons as well as benevolent self-interest. While conventional development is deeply problematic, and inflected with neocolonialism and neo-imperialism, we need to reimagine development so that it is more just and collaborative. As such, a key question for me is whether geography’s engagement with the UN development goals is helping to rethink development or perpetuating the status quo.

Also germane to this question is an ongoing discussion about public scholarship in geography. Kevin Ward has coined the term ‘public geographies’, which he sees as distinct from scholarship for public policy formation (2006; see also Fuller, 2008). Ward draws heavily on the work of the sociologist Michael Burawoy (2004, 2005a, 2005b) and describes policy-oriented writing as scholarship that aims to provide solutions to predefined problems. In contrast, ‘public scholarship is less about intervention and more about bringing a disciplinary perspective into a broader conversation with the public’ (Moseley, 2010: 109). Keeping this distinction in mind, could geography help reorient the conversation about development by engaging with the UN development goals or is the discipline at risk of simply invigorating a narrow discussion circumscribed by predefined questions?

I lastly point out that it is difficult to ignore politics when discussing development goals and metrics in the current era. In a time when right-wing populist movements have affected electoral results in the United States and Europe, we increasingly live in a world where politicians disregard facts and evidence that contravene their world views (Feldmann, 2017). While I am more of a post-structuralist than a positivist, I have grown nostalgic for evidence-based decision-making in the postfact world of contemporary political discussions in the United States. As problematic as goal setting and monitoring may be for the often intangible aspects of development, I recognize that some of this is needed. This leaves me as conflicted and tormented as I suspect Dr Liverman may be on the need for geography to engage with the UN development goals. On the one hand, these goals represent what is wrong with development, both in their conception and in what they measure and do not measure. On the other hand, there is a recognition that these goals may have some sway in orienting development investments and that geography has a valuable perspective to offer in ongoing debates about these goals and measures.

The geographic perspective and development goals

Dr Liverman provides an excellent summary and discussion of geography’s concerns about conventional development and development goals. She also accurately notes that geography has been strangely silent as a scholarly community on this topic (although, at the time of writing, some more recent geographic scholarship has given attention to the topic, see, e.g. D’Alessandro and Zulu, 2017). ¹

As Liverman and others have noted, there have been some positive shifts in the conception of development goals in the transition from MDGs to SDGs. The SDGs nicely update the poverty alleviation focus of the MDGs and combine this with ever-growing concerns about the environment as seen in rounds of global climate change negotiations. These goals also are (significantly in my view) intended for all countries, not just lower income ones.

However, critiques of the UN’s new SDGs abound. Mainstream publications (such as The Economist) have referred to them as ‘sprawling and misconceived’, ‘unfeasibly expensive’, and ‘worse than useless’. Others, such as the Gates Foundation, clearly prefer the preceding MDGs which were more focused on absolute poverty and had measurable targets. More radical critiques tend to revolve around the idea these goals are aimed at saving the world without transforming it. My concerns more closely align with the second perspective. When I look, for example, at SDG#2 on food security and agriculture, there are a myriad of objectives that represent multiple constituencies and likely conflict with each other. On the one hand, we have goals dealing with food access, ending malnutrition, resilient agriculture, and genetic diversity. On the other hand, we have goals about doubling agriculture production, boosting agricultural investment, and increasing free trade. While everyone may see themselves in these goals, there is no strategic prioritization. Furthermore, if we look where development investments are being made, then one could argue that SDG#2 is providing cover for a doubling down on the green revolution, or productionist, approach to addressing challenges related to food security and agriculture.

Strengths of Dr Liverman’s essay are the sections where she considers the potential contributions of the geographic perspective to debates on MDGs and SDGs. This included her useful discussion of the ecological fallacy, where broad averages are inappropriately downscaled to smaller areas or populations, and the modifiable areal unit problem, where analysis fails to account for the impact of the shape and scale of areal units on findings.

I am also worried about what we chose to measure in the MDGs and SDGs and what is missed or occluded in the process. Two African countries illustrate this point. Ethiopia has become a darling of the international development community, an Africa lion with phenomenal growth rates and significant foreign investment. It is also a site of major land grabs and dispossession of small farmers and abuse of human rights (Moseley, 2012). As Liverman correctly points out, economic growth is calculated and recorded, whereas dispossession and abuse of human rights often are not. This leads us to celebrate a process that is deeply problematic.

Burkina Faso represents another interesting case. This country formerly had an charismatic, socialist leader, Thomas Sankara, who came to power in early 1980s and reigned for a few years before he was assassinated in a coup d’état. By emphasizing self-sufficiency, he helped foster, on the heels of major droughts, a noncapitalist agricultural revolution that emphasized soil conservation, agroforestry, intercropping, and affordable or no cost improvements to agriculture production that facilitated access or secured food entitlements for rural people (Sen, 1981). This erstwhile agroecological revolution was aided and abetted by progressive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements like Six-S (Se Servir de la Saison Sèche en Savane et au Sahel) and GRAAP (Groupe de Recherche et d’Action pour l’Autopromotion Paysanne) (Dembele, 2013). This noncapitalist agricultural revolution lasted about 20 years but is now being undone by a capitalist agricultural revolution in the form of the New Green Revolution for Africa with its emphasis on improved seeds, chemical inputs, value chains, and scaling (Gengenbach et al., 2017). We record this latest development as progress, whereas the previous agroecological revolution went virtually unnoticed.

Moving forward

I understand the need for geographers to be involved in the post-2015 development agenda. Not because it makes geography and geographers relevant, but because I think the agenda will look different and better if geographic perspectives are in the mix. That said, I really wonder whether the SDGs are driving the agenda and whether this should be the focus of our energy. To put it in political ecology terms, we need to be cognizant of ultimate not proximate drivers (Moseley et al., 2013), to focus on the agendas of big players and donors, like the Gates Foundation, that are shaping a development agenda reflected in the SDGs.

Furthermore, the SDGs appear to legitimize multiple development agendas already in progress rather than prioritizing transformative approaches over others. As Liverman notes, these goals are also about legitimizing the existence of an institution, the United Nations, that is floundering to find meaning and mission in the contemporary world. Lastly, I am wary of the UN goals to the extent that they seem to be building a case for a certain form of progress and not others.

A different approach might be to use these goals in a process of institutional learning (rather than as measures of certain forms of progress). We are currently running a myriad of development experiments (or natural experiments) to try to improve the human experience. We really don’t know what works and what doesn’t in particular places and with particular populations. Some common metrics might allow us to compare different approaches to see what works where and under what conditions. Such learning could then lead to a level of prioritization for scarce resources. In other words, we could use these goals to learn rather legitimize certain approaches to development.