A boy walks near his home at the Millennium Village project in Dertu, a remote pastoral and nomadic society in northern Kenya, May 8, 2008.ANTONY NJUGUNA/Reuters
Some world leaders will be wearing hair-shirts as they gather in New York this week for a summit on the Millennium Development Goals. Their collective effort - by 2015, they want, among other aspirations, to achieve universal primary education and global access to HIV/AIDS treatment - is not going well. Instead of taking on the MDG's vast ambitions head-on, the summit should inspire a new look at alternative, targeted methods of doing international development.
There is no magic formula for development. Take the first goal: it is inspiring. Imagine a world of full employment, in which we have halved hunger and the number of people living on less than a $1 a day.
But how? There are big, unresolved debates around the best way to end poverty. Massive transfers of wealth or big changes to agricultural subsidies or trade policies are politically unfeasible. And the policies of individual countries can hamper development, as do larger forces like the food and financial crises.
Countries do need to work together to tackle privation. But without an agreement on how, it is easy to shirk responsibility.
There is a role for large promises, such as the 2005 G8 commitment on debt relief or the 2010 G8 promise to improve maternal health, and these need to be tracked closely.
Sometimes thinking smaller gets better results. A model may be the agreements and efforts that largely eradicated polio, limited the depletion of the ozone layer, or removed the scourge of land mines. They were very specific, and relied on leadership from individual states and active citizens before taking hold worldwide.
U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton will help unveil one project inspired by such thinking on Tuesday. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a public-private effort to get 100 million households to adopt cleaner stoves and fuels by 2020. It could sharply reduce the estimated 1.6 million premature deaths each year (according to the World Health Organization) due to indoor air pollution caused by inefficient kerosene and wood-burning stoves in the developing world.
The Millennium Development Goals are an appropriate expression of the world's concern for the poor and needy. But don't count on them as an unerring template. When it comes to development, it's the commitments and the individual policy innovations that count.