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Abstract

The United Nations’ Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) work in pervasive and powerful ways in the international imagination, by naturalising a strategic set of goals, indicators and targets, and in doing so, either opening up, or precluding and prescribing particular possibilities for understanding the state of the world and people's experiences. Our departure point for exploring the need for alternative research routes is therefore an engagement with the conceptualisation of ‘development’, the hopeful product of the 2015 target. This conceptual critique is three-fold: 1. There is a slippage in the discourse of the MDGs between ‘poverty’, ‘health’ and ‘development’ and consequently, the relations between different goals are poorly theorised. 2. There is an absence (or extreme paucity) of structural analysis. 3. While people are surely the centre of the developmental goals, in their formulation there is a remarkable absence both of specific groups of people and any conceptualisation of personhood in a more universal human sense. An alternative framework for understanding development and the relations between structure and agency is explored by theorising the themes of gender, national identity and childhood/youth. We then suggest that narrative methodologies may offer a productive research trajectory.

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The Millennium Development Goalposts

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