Post-2015 Development Assessment: Proposed goals and indicators
By Walden Bello

from my latest piece, “Post-2015 Development Assessment: Proposed goals and indicators,” which appears in Development, 2013, 56(1), (93–102) © 2013 Society for International Development 1011-6370/13 http://www.sidint.net/development/

In this article, we argue that the MDG process, which has played a vital role in helping create a global intolerance for high levels of poverty, inequality and marginalization, must be complemented by a development assessment exer- cise that is focused on the structural factors preventing development and poverty reduction from taking place on a sustained basis. Such an exercise, we contend, must rest on a paradigm that has a critical component and a prescriptive com- ponent. The absence of such a paradigm is what limited the usefulness of the MDG exercise.

While mainly external in origin, these structures articulate with internal structures and forces to create stubborn obstacles to reform. Corporate-driven globalization facilitated by neoliberal ideo- logical prescriptions has been the central cause of the spread of poverty and the entrenchment of inequality, the most important dimension of which is inequality among countries. Fundamentally, what the world has been traversing in recent years is a crisis of capitalism caused by its tendency towards overproduction or excess capacity.

Development assessment must, however, be based not only on a critique but on a paradigm of
development that contains the goals or features of an economy that is considered desirable from the point of view of equity and sustainability.

While there are many important features of such an economy, the assessment proposed here focuses on seven dimensions for which indicators are suggested. These seven dimensions are climate stabilization, financial reregulation, inequal ity reduction, food security, decommodification, social protection, and industrialization.

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