Jamie Drummond, Executive Director and Global Strategy for ONE, delivers a TED talk focused on the much-debated issue of the Millennium Development Goals. More specifically, he discusses what is to come after 2015 and how the new goals will be determined.
"As we gather here in Edinburgh, technocrats appointed by the UN and certain governments, with the best intentions, are busying themselves designing a new package of goals. And currently they are doing that through pretty much the same old late-20th century, top down, elite, closed process."
Drummond explains in a ONE blog post:
What’s exciting is that, unlike in 2000 when the first goals were agreed, internet and mobile phones have spread all around the world. People are more connected than ever. So, I’d like to explore how we could use this technology to involve people from around the world in co-designing an historic first: the world’s first ever truly global poll and consultation on “What the World Wants”. Let’s crowd-source the new Millennium Development Goals. I believe that through this crowd-sourcing we won’t just improve the quality of the goals, we will also increase the quality of support for getting the goals done.In the talk, he lays out the three steps to move the new agenda forward.
- Collecting - Doing public opinion polls wherever possible. Collect a strong baseline survey as a point of comparing the progress countries.
- Connecting - Use new media tools to activate and connect with people around the world who can then enforce a level of accountability.
- Committing - Achieving the two other steps will compel foreign leaders to commit as determined in the previous steps. It will also require accountability that comes through tools like Ushahidi and Kenya's open data dashboard.
An interesting idea that raises a series of questions: Who will implement the idea? How will the information be collected? Who will be surveyed and how? What are the limits of crowdsourcing? How will this ensure that the goals are in fact right for the people who are affected most by their creation? How is success measured?
I posed a few of those questions to Drummond and asked a few other experts to weigh in as I develop this into an actual story. Feel free to offer some suggestions and ideas.
3 comments:
I think an important question (related to your first one), is, who will choose which of the many, many goals that pop out of a global survey will actually be chosen and acted on?
A global survey, if left open-ended, will get lots and lots and lots of responses. More than can be acted on. Some will probably conflict. If the point of this exercise is simply to say, "we asked people what goals were worthwhile, and here's what they said," then nobody needs to choose which goals are worth acting on. But if the point is to actually act on them in a coordinated, high-level way (a la the MDGs), then someone will have to pick winners and losers.
How would such goals be *selected* (as opposed to *collected*)? By raw popularity? One man, one vote, top 8 goals wins? Top 10 goals? Top 15? And if so, is that a workable plan? Can the globe really be run like an Athenian democracy, where policy goals are chosen by popular vote, rather than, say, the more practical republican form of governance (also a la MDGs)? If not, then someone will have to decide, in which case, who? And what's the difference between such a process and the one that produced the Millennium Declaration in 2000? If a global survey produces dozens or even hundreds of goals, and a high-level diplomatic/technocratic/political body like the U.N. simply chooses the top 8 or so, that seems hardly novel.
Or, if the survey has a finite number of choices, then a) who chooses those choices, and b) who chooses from *among* those choices which are worthwhile, in which case we're back to the question of whether this is at all novel or different.
As is often the case in development, the devil is in the details, and the empirical evidence supporting any given decision seems thin.
It would be an interesting thing to try out and speaks to the concern many NGOs voice of the need to ensure a "legitimate" outcome is reached. The problem is that nobody seems to have a definition of what legitimacy actually means.
Good point, Chris.
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