The Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved solely through -country-level investments, debt relief, and trade reform. National strategies need to link with one another and with international coordination mechanisms to provide regional and global public goods.
Regional infrastructure and institutions
A country's immediate neighbors tend to be among its most important trading partners. These ties can be strengthened through regional infrastructure and policy cooperation, both of which are critical for economic growth and poverty reduction when an economy has a small population or if it is landlocked, a small island state, or dependent on neighbors for food, water, or energy. Similarly, transboundary watersheds, desertification, air pollution, and biodiversity can only be managed through regional strategies. And since many local conflicts have repercussions on entire regions or are driven by regional tensions, conflict management requires greater regional cooperation to detect conflicts before they erupt and to develop coordinated responses from neighboring countries to end them.
To address these needs, we recommend that four types of regional public goods be supported internationally and integrated into national MDG-based poverty reduction strategies:
- Infrastructure for transport, energy, or water management.
- Coordination mechanisms to manage transboundary environmental issues.
- Institutions to promote economic cooperation, including coordination and harmonization in trade policies and procedures.
- Political cooperation mechanisms for regional dialogue and consensus-building, as exemplified by the African Peer Review Mechanism.
Strengthening the provision of regional goods requires substantial investment. For low-income countries, this typically implies the need for external funding. Countries also need to strengthen their regional institutions by streamlining responsibilities and conferring some sovereignty into partnerships where necessary.
Mobilizing global science and technology for the Millennium Development Goals
Advances in science and technology allow society to mobilize new sources of energy and materials, fight disease, improve and diversify agriculture, mobilize and disseminate information, transport people and goods with greater speed and safety, limit family size as desired, and much more. But these technologies are not free. They are the fruits of enormous social investments in education, scientific discovery, and targeted technological projects.
Every successful high-income country makes special public investments to promote scientific and technological capacities. Unfortunately, poor countries have largely been spectators, or at best users, of the technological advances produced in the high-income world that are relevant. Poor countries have tended to lack large scientific and technological communities. Their scientists and engineers, chronically underfunded, move abroad for satisfying employment in scientific research and development. Private companies, moreover, focus their innovation activities on rich-country problems and projects, since that is where adequate financial returns exist.
Any strategy to meet the Goals requires a special global effort to build scientific and technological capacities in the poorest countries, both to help drive economic development and to help forge solutions to developing countries' own scientific challenges. A focus should be on strengthening institutions of higher education. A special global effort is also required to direct research and development towards specific challenges facing the poor in disease, climate, agriculture, energy, and environmental degradation. Realistic prospects exist to develop new vaccines and medicines for malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other killer diseases in poor countries. Improved sexual and reproductive health products would include microbicides, new female-controlled methods, and male contraceptives. Improved agricultural varieties and cropping systems can increase food productivity of rainfed agriculture. Accurate environmental monitoring and forecasting can help focus actions with the greatest positive impact. Other examples abound.
To address these most pressing of scientific issues, direct public financing of research needs to increase. A preliminary estimate suggests that by 2015, at least $7 -billion a year will be required, of which perhaps $4 billion would be directed at public health. Another $1 billion would go toward agriculture and improved natural resource management by nearly tripling the current budget of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Roughly another $1 billion would go toward improved energy technologies. And perhaps $1 billion is needed for greater understanding of seasonal, interannual, and long-term climate change.
An international strategy to mitigate climate change
Climate change is a major development issue that needs to be addressed urgently. Unless global warming slows down, the incidence of droughts and floods will likely increase, vector-borne diseases will probably expand their reach, and many ecosystems, such as mangroves and coral reefs, will likely be put under great strain. In short, achievements in the fight against disease, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation risk being unraveled by climate change.
In addition to an improved scientific understanding of climate change and country-level adaptation strategies, the world must mitigate climate change by stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting carbon sequestration, and helping countries adapt to the effects of climate change. Additional measures must be implemented to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the -atmosphere in the near future. As agreed at Johannesburg, primary responsibility for mitigating climate change and other unsustainable patterns of -production and consumption, such as the overharvesting of global fisheries, must lie with the countries that cause the problems. Those are the high-income and some of the rapidly growing middle-income countries. |
