The Millennium Development Goals: Challenges, Prospects and Opportunities

As the 15-year Millennium Development Goals approach their conclusion, we can now measure their larger successes and failures in more than ‘snapshot’ fashion; and we can begin to consider how best to shape the international development agenda for the coming decades based on what we have learned. But the performance and outlook for the MDGs can neither be reduced to the sum of its eight goals, nor be divorced from international dynamics - the hard interests of states and other actors, and the global dynamics that impact on both. For that reason, this volume balances contextual analysis, the role of formative and constraining forces, the importance of normative considerations and illuminating case studies to deliver a study of the MDGs which has depth and nuance as well as breadth. Poised between judging the recent performance and the future promise of the MDGs, this book is substantial, provocative and timely.

This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Nana Poku is Visiting Professor of African Politics at University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was Senior Policy Advisor to the Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa and Executive Director of the UN Secretary-General's Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa.

Jim Whitman is Professor of Global Governance in the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford. He is the general editor of the Palgrave Global Issues series. His latest books are The Fundamentals of Global Governance (2009); as editor, Global Governance (2009); and as editor with Sarah Perrigo, The Geneva Conventions Under Assault (2010).