Beyond Targets: Addressing Inequality Post 2015
Almost everyone acknowledges the importance of addressing inequality. But will it become a focus of the new post-2015 development agenda, and reinforce our priorities as a development community moving forward?
A week before a meeting of the United Nations Secretary General’s High Level Panel in Bali, a group of 90 leading academics and development experts addressed an open letter to the panelists, asking that inequality be put at the forefront of the new post-2015 agenda. They said that in order to have any hope of eradicating extreme poverty, the vast inequalities both within countries and between countries would have to be addressed. Many NGOs and civil society groups have echoed these concerns, citing income inequality, as well as disparities in other dimensions such as health and education, as the primary obstacles to sustainable development. Despite this pressure, the communiqué issued by the Panel in Bali did not explicitly mention inequality. This absence is disconcerting for a number of reasons.
It is widely acknowledged that the previous global agenda shaped by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) did not successfully address inequalities. One of the primary critiques of the MDG framework is that it focused excessively on national and global averages, which masked growing disparities among specific populations. The MDGs were cast as targets to be reached through the provision of key services, without much reference to who participated in those systems of service delivery and how. A UN task team notes in a recent report that to an extent this emphasis on targets reinforced structures of distribution that were unequal and may have contributed to discrimination against marginalized groups. If the new agenda merely reinstates new targets based on the same model as the MDGs, then we run the risk of encouraging the reduction of poverty, sickness, and illiteracy only among those who are easiest to reach, and widening the gaps between the poor and the rich.
In trying to create a new agenda that actually addresses these disparities, it is important to recognize what makes inequality fundamentally different from poverty. We tend to conceive of poverty as consisting of certain deprivations, either in income, or in other dimensions like health, education, or political freedom. These deprivations can be indentified within individuals, quantified, and acted upon through a variety of interventions. A sick person can be given drugs. An illiterate child can get an education. Inequality is very different in that it cannot be measured as a deprivation, but consists of a relationship between those who are deprived and others who are not. In order to tackle inequality, you must look beyond the poor person and their deprivation to see how their interactions with others contributes to and even constitutes their marginalization.
So what would it take to shift from an approach that targets deprivations to one that changes relationships? Poverty in various dimensions can be measured and quantified, but a relationship cannot be represented in numbers. Measures such as the Gini Index and the newer Palma Ratio attempt to quantify inequality by looking at the gap between the rich and the poor. These measurements are certainly useful in a number of ways, yet they capture only income inequality and fail to incorporate other dimensions. In many places, profound inequality exists between men and women, between tenants and landowners, between one ethnicity and another. It would be naïve to think these varying forms of inequality could be reduced to a single metric.
With today’s focus on measuring impact, there is the widespread belief that if something can be quantified and tracked, then problems can be solved. This is certainly the logic that the MDGs relied upon. In order to refocus on inequality, there needs to be a certain acceptance that inequality cannot be reduced to a number. The ability of the post-2015 framework to deal with inequality will depend less on developing unified global targets, and more on who it is that accepts, invokes, and utilizes these new goals.
The MDGs contained many laudable goals that a wide array of actors could agree on, but these goals were developed by a small closed team and they were not taken up as a tool for consensus building and action by most of the poor throughout the world. Instead, the MDGs were invoked most frequently by traditional international development actors such as multilaterals, NGOs, and governments in order to both focus policies and justify their actions and interventions.
Yet addressing poverty and inequality is by no means the prerogative of the development industry alone. As someone who works for international development institutions, I fully believe that these organizations can play a very important role. But we must recognize the much broader range of actors that are needed to bring about real change. In many cases it is the farmers associations, the labor unions, the women’s groups, the churches, the advocacy organizations, and the activists at the local level who have the greatest potential to truly fight inequality as it exists in their context. In order to really bring inequality to the forefront of the post-2015 agenda, we should focus less on quantifying and dictating global actions and interventions for the poor, and more on building an agenda that can be used by the poor to advocate for change.
By Kim Ouillette, an intern at InterAction. She has worked on development projects in Ghana and Liberia, and is the co-founder and director of the Liberian Education Fund. She is an undergraduate student of International Development at George Washington University.
