The Millennium Development Goals and Ambitious Developmental

Engineering

Clive Gabay, Queen Mary University of London –

c.gabay@qmul.ac.uk

This is a draft. Please do not cite without author’s

permission

Abstract

Donor governments have been accused of not doing enough for

the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), while the MDGs have

been accused from other quarters of not doing enough for

development. The former position takes the MDGs as an

unquestionable good, whilst the latter as a Western hoax for

the sedimentation of core-periphery relations. This paper

transcends this debate, identifying in the goals a logic of

ambitious social, cultural and spatial engineering. Inspired

by Foucauldian development anthropology, the paper highlights

three themes implicit in MDG texts requiring biopolitical

interventions on bodies, societies and spaces, namely risk,

sex, gender and family; homo economicus; and the city. The

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paper concludes with a reflection on the likelihood of

resistance to such interventions.

Introduction

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been a source of

debate since their adoption by the United Nations family in

2001. This paper seeks to bring a new perspective to that

debate. Whilst most commentators and analysts have been

concerned with how the goals can be achieved in their 2015

timeframe, more critical voices have argued that the goals

merely represent an impoverished and reductionist programme of

development. This paper seeks to transcend both poles of this

debate by analysing the MDGs not simply on their own terms as

either a success or failure, nor as an insufficient

development agenda, but rather as an ambitious programme of

biopolitical social, cultural and spatial engineering (from

hereon in: socio-cultural-spatial). In other words, this paper

will argue that the content of the goals requires a mass

restructuring of capital and market-friendly societal,

individual and spatial practices and forms, which, although

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not explicit in the goals themselves, are an underlying and

necessary logic to them.

The paper will proceed by outlining the prominence and

emergence of the MDGs as a development paradigm in more

detail, before highlighting and critiquing mainstream debates

around the goals, their origins and implications. The paper

will then establish the theoretical framework for the

empirical sections, which draws on Foucauldian concepts of

governmentality and biopolitics, as well as development

anthropology partly inspired by this perspective. There

follows a discursive analysis of the MDGs across three

biopolitical thematic areas: Risk, sex, family, and gender;

Homo economicus; and the City. The paper concludes with a

reflection on the prospects for resistance that are inevitably

intertwined with the MDGs as an unintentional yet strategic

programme of socio-cultural-spatial engineering.

Prominence of the MDG paradigm

Then Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan

referred to the MDGs as a ‘seminal event’ in the history of

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the UNi, and for those concerned with poverty and development,

the MDGs are indeed ‘…here, there and everywhere’ii. For

instance, every OECD DAC country has adopted the goals as

their development aid spending framework, whilst the World

Bank’s engagement with developing countries, through its

poverty reduction strategy (PRS) process, is similarly framed

by the MDGs. Major civil society networks have adopted the

goals to coalesce around in pressuring their own governments

and multilateral institutions to meet development pledgesiii.

Lastly, the MDGs have become ubiquitous across donor agencies,

many of whom have major sections of their websitesiv and teams

of policy experts and advocates dedicated to the goals.

What binds all of these functions together is of course the

common assumption that the MDGs are unproblematic and

incontestable. Whilst critics of the goals have illustrated

how they are in fact both problematic and contestable, most

have concluded that this is because they impoverish the idea

of developmentv. In this journal, Zai recently argued that the

MDGs represent a de-politicisation of developmentvi. However,

this paper seeks to illustrate how the MDGs represent an

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ambitious project of neo-liberal socio-cultural-spatial

engineering, albeit one which has not necessarily materialised

or spatialised in always intentional ways. This is an

important point: whilst the goals themselves emerged from a

neo-liberal developmentalist paradigmvii, it would be

inaccurate to ascribe straightforward intentionality to all of

the implicit logics contained within the goals. Rather, the

goals cleave to a particular logic, which produces a range of

practices, not designed, but nonetheless coherent in the sense

that they promote specific forms of neo-liberal social and

cultural behaviour, and spatial re-ordering, at the macro and

micro-political level. What is at stake here is an

understanding of both the ambitious nature of development

policy, which is paradoxically often attacked for being

reductionist, and simultaneously an understanding of the

limitations of this ambition when abstract neoliberal logics

become embodied and ‘grounded’ in everyday lives and

practices.

The paper will proceed with some background on the emergence

of the MDGs, before outlining the ways in which the majority

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of MDG-related debates, including those which are critical,

are trapped in a self-referential paradigm where the MDGs are

taken at face value and are thus at most considered to be

narrow and reductionist.

The MDGs: What they are and how they emerged

The MDGs consist of eight targets each with their own subset

of targets and indicatorsviii. Very often in public discourse,

and not infrequently in academic debate, the MDGs are treated

uncritically, as a list of problems to be solved. Of course on

one level the goals are incontestable. All 192 members of the

General Assembly did endorse the Millennium Declaration (MD)

which underpins the subsequent goals. However, the Declaration

and the Goals were two separate entities; the former was the

declaration released after the UN Millennium Summit in 2000,

and like most UN summit declarations before it, the euphoria

quickly died away to leave many words but not much action. So

it was that the Millennium Development Goals were conceived of

as a way of “…rescuing the document from oblivion”ix.

Translating a vague document into concrete goals and targets

became a distinctly political process involving mostly OECD6

member states, UN agencies and the World Bankx. Because of this

it has become easy for some critics of the MDGs paradigm to

paint the goals as an intentional project of imperial

hegemonic domination. As we will now see though, across a

spectrum of perspectives, from the constructive to the

rejectionist, nearly all criticisms of the MDGs have become

stuck in a reductionist rut, failing to account for the

ambitious nature implicit in the goals.

Critiquing the critiques

Debates and critiques of the MDGs tend to fall into three

camps. First, there are those who fret over the progress being

made to reach the goals and whose energies are thus spent

trying to find more efficient ways to achieve them. Second,

there are those who believe the goals offer an opportunity for

social and economic justice, but believe that they have been

hijacked by ideological and economic interests. The MDGs, for

this camp, need to be ‘saved’. Lastly, there is the group who

argue that the goals represent a reductionist and neo-liberal

vision of development. For this group, the goals are a

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diminished development agenda masking the real underlying causes

of poverty.

Camp one: The fretters

It is clear from any cursory look at literature on the MDGs

that most discussion around them is paradigm-affirming.

Fretters seek to understand whether the world is on track to

meet the goals, and if not, what more can be done in this

regard; they fret over the success of the goals. Journal special

issues are dedicated to such concerns (see for example:

International Journal of Social Economics (2004) 31: 1/2;

International Journal of Human Rights (2009) 13:1; IDS

Bulletin (2010) 41:1; Third World Quarterly (2011), 32:1),

whilst a cursory search for ‘Millennium Development Goals’ on

major book-stocking websites reveals long lists of

technocratic volumes detailing attempts to ‘scale up’ efforts

to reach the goalsxi.

Fretters are the most ambitious of the three camps discussed

in this section. They accept development orthodoxy and cleave

most tightly to the underlying logics of neoliberal socio-

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cultural-spatial engineering inherent to the goals. This has

become much clearer recently as we have seen a greater volume

of literature dedicated to what might come after the MDGs expire

in 2015. For example, Poku and Whitman in the Third World

Quarterly special issue on the MDGs list a number of criteria

which would need to be applied to a post-2015 development

settlement. They talk of ‘country and sector enablement’,

‘emphasising disaggregated targets over global benchmarks’,

‘improving [country] data collection’, and focussing on

‘qualitative aspects of complex forms of human relatedness

over technical “solutions”’xii. At first, these suggest

tailoring development strategies more closely to country

requirements, and scaling up in-country abilities to monitor

progress. However, on another level, we can read these

assertions as requiring further social and cultural

penetration of development-recipient societies. For instance,

measuring development against more disaggregated benchmarks

requires an array of ever more panoptical methods to ensure

country compliance. What we see here then is not a programme

of intentional control, but an underlying logic which portrays

the problem of development being located in those countries

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not experiencing it, and the solution as being a wholesale

transformation of those societies. Importantly, this

transformation is not here a result of development, but a

precursor to it.

Camp two: The purists

Members of this camp tend to assert that the purity of the

MDGs has become corrupted by other interests and processes.

Hulme for example argues that the MDGs are constituted by two

discourses in tension with each other, human development on

the one hand, and a neo-liberal managerialistic results-based

management on the other, which seeks measurable outputs from

investments of resources. Hulme argues that ‘this focus on

“measurable” leads to a reduced interest in difficult to

measure goals, such as human rights’. And so, even though

Hulme goes on to argue that ‘…the MDGs are surprisingly

coherent, given the processes and influences out of which they

developed’, this is despite the fact that the goals have been

hijacked by a technocratic and reductive rationalexiii. The

MDGs, if they succeed, will do so in spite of attempts to

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shoehorn the complex matter of human development into

measurable log-frames and matrices.

Building on this perspective, Vandemoortele nakedly admonishes

those who expect too much from the MDGs, arguing that ‘The

misappropriation of the MDGs as a Trojan horse for a

particular development narrative cannot be held against the

MDGs. Anything that gets some international traction risks

being misappropriated.’ Again we arrive at an idea that the

MDGs are in and of themselves somehow pure, only becoming

tainted by other interests and actors once they have emerged.

This is reinforced by the assertion that ‘They focus on ends,

not on means, on the destination and not on the journey’xiv.

What this move does is distract our attention from the content

of the goals. The MDGs themselves are deemed pure, beyond

reproach, capable of eradicating poverty if only everyone

could agree on an equitable and just means of pursuing them.

Camp Three: The reductionists

It is very tempting to finish a critical analysis of the MDGs

at the boundaries laid out by this camp. For reductionists, the

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MDGs represent a hegemonic and therefore exclusionary

definition of development. They are argued to be technocratic

(Saith, 2006)xv, neo-liberal in their responsibilisation of

weak nation statesxvi, and devoid of any structuralxvii,

racialised or genderedxviii analysis of poverty. The MDGs

represent the culmination of a neo-liberal logic which ties

developing countries into a hegemonic project of market-led

development. This therefore furthers ‘…some of the most

dramatic and explosive dimensions of the era of market

liberalization and neoliberal globalization — that of

spectacularly rising inequalities that are as visible as the

worsening forms of social and service exclusion in large parts

of the third world’xix.

However, these authors fail to provide us with an

understanding of the work that hegemony does. Indeed, implicit

in an argument which states that the MDGs are hegemonic must

be an admission of their power to shape imaginations and

practices, rather than exist as a simple abstraction. It is

unlikely that such a diminished agenda would generate such a

high level of consent amongst seemingly unlikely bedfellows,

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including governments, social movements, the private sector

and academic communities. Indeed, it is the argument here that

the goals, far from being a diminished narrative of

development, are in fact incredibly ambitious, in that in

order for them to be achieved there would need to be wide-

ranging socio-cultural-spatial transformations across and

within areas of high poverty. It is only by imagining them as

such that we can appreciate the concomitant levels of perhaps

unintended and micro-resistant practices that may result from

the imposition of such a broad and deep agenda. I have in mind

here James Scott’s analogy (made in a very different context

of overt class exploitation but nevertheless still applicable)

of how ‘multiple acts of peasant insubordination and evasion

create political and economic barrier reefs…Whenever…the ship

of state runs aground on such reefs, attention is usually paid

to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of

petty acts that made it possible’xx. As Scott goes on to

demonstrate, such acts of resistance are often not conceived

of as such, but may rather be related to broader cultural and

social practices which by their existence prove resistant to

hegemonic forms of socio-cultural-spatial engineering.

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The rest of this paper then will be dedicated to a very

specific task, reflecting a developing research programme

investigating the socio-cultural-spatial impacts of the MDGs

in sub-Saharan Africa and concomitant resistant practices.

What follows is an attempt to underpin such a project,

involving an analysis of the MDGs’ textual ‘machinery of

representation’xxi, including some of the major representative

MDG texts which have been issued since their

introductionxxii.The rest of this paper will therefore be

dedicated to sketching out the terrain which the MDGs

construct for the subjects of development created therein.

Establishing the terrain: Power and authorlessness

As is clear from the above, when tackled at all, the power of

the MDGs has been conceptualised in what Foucault might have

called sovereign terms. When Foucault famously argued that ‘We

need to cut off the King's head’xxiii, he was referring to the

trend within political theory to view power as centralised, to

reify it as sovereign. This was reflected in the fact that ‘…

the formal theoretical concern with what was taken to be power

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had been fixed…in a preoccupation with questions of causality,

sovereignty and order’xxiv. This is clear from the final,

reductionist camp of MDG analysts cited above, who, even

though taking critical stances on the MDGs, overwhelmingly

view them as a direct project of hegemonic domination which

mask the ‘real’ interests of developing countries.

In a Foucauldian sense then, the power of the MDGs can be

understood in more embodied, and thus self-administered terms,

or what Foucault called ‘the conduct of conduct’xxv. Abrahamsen

sums this up effectively when she states that: ‘Power…works

through systems of knowledge and discursive practices to

provide the meanings, norms, values and identities that not

only constrain actors, but also constitute them... The modern

self is both the object of improvement and the subject that

does the improving’xxvi.

Of course though, if we de-centre power, then it is very

difficult to ascribe intentionality to one subject or another,

e.g. the United Nations, Capitalism, or Imperialism. Indeed,

whilst this paper largely concerns itself with what Jan

Bachmann might call a ‘programmers’ view’xxvii (i.e. by taking

as its unit of analysis the MDG texts, rather than the bodies

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on which these texts have become inscribed) it does so in the

context of considering the MDGs as being ‘authorless’. How

does this relate to the distinctly authored sense of the MDGs

related in the opening sections of this paper? As James

Ferguson has argued ‘“Development”…may do what it does, not at

the bidding of some knowing and powerful subject who is making

it all happen, but behind the backs of or against the wills of

even the most powerful actors. A “development” project may

very well serve power, but in a different way than any of the

“powerful” actors imagined; it may only wind up, in the end,

“turning out” to serve power’. In this sense then, the

expressed intentions of the drafters of the MDGs are beside

the point. Rather, it is the way in which ‘…planned

interventions may produce unintended outcomes that end up, all

the same, incorporated into anonymous constellations of

control – authorless strategies…that turn out in the end to

have a kind of political intelligibility’xxviii.

This is an important distinction and one which bears dwelling

on briefly. As was illustrated above, for reductionists the

MDGs were drafted with the specific aim of maintaining core-

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periphery relations in the global economy. This paper argues

though that whilst this may indeed be a result of the MDGs,

the kind of intentionality this criticism ascribes to the

drafters of the goals misses the way in which these are

consequences of the logics which pervade them, rather than an

intentional project of domination. This implies a far richer

and far-reaching process of socio-cultural-spatial engineering

(the main focus of this paper), as well as greater

possibilities for reworking these logics (the focus of future

research).

This approach aligns itself with a perspective cogniscant of

the limitations of governmentality. Recent debates in this field

(see International Political Sociology (2010) 4 (2); and exchanges in

Global Society between Chandlerxxix and Kiersy, Weidner and

Rosenowxxx) have revolved around the inapplicability of a

governmentality framework outside of the advanced liberal

states Foucault developed the concept to characterise. Whilst

this has led some to reject governmentality as a framework for

understanding supra-national or non-European contextsxxxi, it is

precisely these limitations that make governmentality an

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interesting framework to adopt for a study of power, for there

is no power without error, no power without limits, and no

power without resistance. As Josephs argues ‘...we need to

distinguish between the process that leads to the imposition

of neoliberal programmes that reflect the dominant rationality

of advanced liberal societies, and the inappropriateness of

these technologies at a local level due to very different

social conditions’xxxii.

The rest of this paper will therefore illustrate the ways in

which the MDGs provide a resource to engineer societies in

developing countries according to neoliberal logics of

sociability and agency albeit that such engineering is not

necessarily an intentional aspect of the goals (although as we

will see there are exceptions) and may certainly not prove to

be ‘successful’ in the eyes of development planners. It is the

fact that eradicating 50% of extreme poverty, increasing

primary levels of (particular forms of) education and the rest

of the goals constructs a broader landscape where people and

places have to be transformed. It is also the case though that

this broader and unintended landscape provides more

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opportunities for resistance to the logics implied in and by

the goals. These practices are not the subject of this paper,

although will be returned to in the conclusion.

The following analysis is set out thematically. It is tempting

of course to discursively analyse and present such an analysis

on a goal-by-goal basis, but this would be to be trapped

within the hegemony of the goals, which divides development by

eight and thus results in an oversight of key themes which

define the transformative ambitions of the goals. In other

words, to structure an analysis of the MDGs around the goals

would be to be structured by the goals themselves.

The paper introduces three key themes constructed through the

goals and their associated texts, namely Risk Sex; Gender and

Family; Homo Economicus; and the City. This is not in any way

an exhaustive list, but should rather be treated as indicative

of what work the MDGs do as an active agent of development.

Future research on the goals should involve elaborating on the

vast terrain constructed by the MDGs, and the ways in which

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people constructed as MDG subjects live with, embody and/or

resist this terrain.

Biopolitics and the MDGs

Whilst on the whole resiliently technocratic, there are

occasional explicit references to the biopolitical nature of

the development project contained in the MDGs. For instance,

in Keeping the Promise, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon

explicitly suggests that the successful pursuit of the goals

requires what Foucault outlined as the governmental project’s

core purpose: the ‘conduct of conduct’ in order to create

‘rational’ subjectsxxxiii. The report proposes ‘…effective

policies to support implementation, defined in this context as

laws, regulations, standards, administrative procedures and

guidelines (general or specific to the Millennium Development

Goals) that affect private behaviour and the conduct of

service providers and others with whom they must

interact.’xxxiv. This statement clearly expresses a logic of

behaviour-change which exists within the programming of the

goals Similarly, the Sachs report implicitly endorses the

rationalization of social behavior when it claims that

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‘Information and education are essential in promoting community

demand for services that may be unfamiliar or not considered a

priority.’xxxv (Italics added). It is again important to bear in

mind that whilst this logic exists within important MDG texts,

this paper is not making the claim that the MDGs were

explicitly designed to engineer societies, spaces and

individuals. However, it is a consequence of the highly

target-driven and comprehensive nature of the MDGs that such

logics emerge to secure as a necessary component of their

implementation.

Risk, Sex, Gender and Family

Throughout the MDG texts these constitutive elements are

consistently articulated together. Risky sexual behavior (the

definition of which, as we will see, is itself not a pre-

given) is portrayed overwhelmingly as an issue for women that

can be most safely dealt with in the confines of the

monogamous nuclear family.

To begin with, sexual behaviour which involves several

partners, whether simultaneously or not, is deemed to be

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risky. So for instance, according to the rationale for MDG

indicator 19xxxvi (MDG 6, Target 7), ‘AIDS prevention programmes

try to discourage high numbers of partnerships and to

encourage mutual monogamy… delaying age at first sex, reducing

the number of non-regular sexual partners and being faithful

to one partner’. What Indicator 19b (MDG 6, Target 7) thus

deems to be ‘comprehensive correct knowledge of HIV/AIDS’

consists of knowing that condoms prevent HIV transmission and

that sexual activity should be limited to one faithful

uninfected partnerxxxvii. This immediately marks out those

carrying the HIV virus as inherently risky (with implications

for the kinds of relationships deemed socially acceptable for

HIV carriers), and constructs a terrain upon which multiple

interventions are thus made possible, not simply or directly

connected to the virus (i.e. drug and condom distribution) but

also to behaviour change and public education programmes (See

for example the ‘social marketing’ campaigns for condoms which

proliferated in and around the time of the launch of the

MDGsxxxviii). In this framing, everyone in developing countries

is at risk of contracting HIV, and so efforts must be made

induce populations to engage in safe sexual behavior, from a

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pool of fewer and fewer prospective partners. Sex itself in

developing countries thus becomes ‘…inherently problematic,

instituting policy interventions…to classify, medicate, and

regulate sexual practice.’xxxix

Sabatier argued that the Western fixation on monogamy in the

1980s was a direct result of a realization amongst those

societies that HIV was not simply a disease confined to gay

communitiesxl (1988: 67). This belief that we are all potential

victims has thus fed into a discourse of African promiscuity

as a reflection of Western fears and values. However, as

Griffin has recently argued in relation to World Bank activity

in the area of HIV/AIDS, ‘Little evidence exists…to support

Western perceptions of African hyper-sexuality and sexual

promiscuity. In terms not least of attitudes to sex and

promiscuity in Western society, many African societies seem

noticeably chaste in comparison with the West’xli. Nonetheless,

it is precisely those very local attitudes and knowledge which

are deemed inhibitive to the project of fighting HIV, which

requires ‘comprehensive, correct knowledge’ (Indicator 19b, MDG 6,

Target 7) to be beaten. Risk must therefore be mediated

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through external expertise (at least in the first instance)

and regulated through appropriate behavior, such as monogamous

sex. HIV is thus culturalised and individualized, and efforts

to diminish its prevalence become an individual (normally a

woman’s) act, rather than linked to a range of socio-economic

and structural processes which sees developing countries

uniquely vulnerable to the HIV virus.

With sex of a certain kind posited as risky, it is women who

are deemed to be most at risk in this discourse. This is made

quite explicit in Indicator 19a (MDG 6, Target 7) ‘Women’s

risk of becoming infected with HIV during unprotected sexual

intercourse is higher than that of men. The risk is even

higher for younger women. Social and cultural factors may

increase women’s vulnerability to HIV infection. For instance,

cultural norms related to sexuality often prevent girls from

taking active steps to protect themselves’xlii. Thus women are

reduced to being at the whim of culture in ways men are not.

Indeed, it is men who produce this culture and thus

simultaneously those who can liberate women from itxliii. Again,

this provides a discursive rationale for a raft of

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programmatic interventions aimed at male and female role-

making, based on pre-ordained ideas about what their current

roles are (i.e. female victimhood and male aggression), devoid

of any structural analysis for how these roles are themselves

constructed.

So it is that the rationale for the nuclear family is produced

through and from the ‘sex as risk’ discourse found in the MDG

texts. For instance, the Sachs Report asserts that

‘Households, in particular, are important in “producing

health.” They do this by practicing health-promoting behaviors

and by delivering home-based interventions’ and that ‘healthy

and responsible sexual behaviour…occur[s] in households and

communities’xliv. Needless to say these communities should not

be polygamous! What then should these households look like?

They should, implicitly, be nuclear. The Sachs report is

explicit that ‘smaller families and longer birth intervals

allow families to invest more in each child’s nutrition and

health…Families with fewer children, and children spaced

further apart, can afford to invest more in each child’s

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education’xlv. Whilst this may be the case, such assertions

rest on two pillars. One, that projections of the nuclear

family, when articulated with discourses on sex, risk and

gender, rest on pre-ordained imaginations of the predatory

male and promiscuous yet vulnerable female, and rule out other

ways of imagining the kinds of households that could produce

respectful and loving adult relationships, healthy children

and improved life-chances for all.

Secondly, these statements about the nature of family rest on

an assumption that existing conditions of corporate land

acquisition and other resource extractive economic development

are perfectly valid. This is an assumption which fails to

establish a connection with why it is that large families have

become increasingly unsustainable. For instance, child

mortality may be high in some areas not because families are

large, but because resources (especially land) are unevenly

distributed, and because access to healthcare is often

prohibitively expensive. The absence of recognition of

structural conditions is underlined by the following assertion

that ‘sexual and reproductive health can help stabilize

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population numbers in rural areas, slow urban migration, and

balance natural resource use with the needs of the

population.’xlvi Such statements reinforce prejudices about

poverty-related hyper-sexuality and sexual productivity, and

ignore the structural production of large families where they

exist, as well as alternative economic conditions under which

they may well be more sustainable i.e. the equitable

distribution of land. The MDGs thus compel a

re-embedding/engineering of the social which conform to

liberalised economic conditions, and not vice-versa (i.e.

creating economic conditions which conform to social needs).

The promotion of the nuclear family is thus part of a broader

imagination of the kind of society necessary to eradicate

poverty, one which is entrepreneurially and capitalistically

productive. Of course, this is not the stated raison d’etre of

the MDGs, and many MDG texts go to great lengths in order to

reject naked neo-liberalismxlvii. Nonetheless, it is the logics

implicit in the goals which construct capital-friendly family

units in this way. It is to tracing the idea of a

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developmental homo economicus in the MDGs that this paper

shall now turn.

Homo Economicus

All paths lead to productivity in the MDGs. Nowhere is this

more explicitly put than in the Sachs report, which states

that ‘For the billion plus people living in extreme poverty,

they [the goals] represent the means to a productive life’xlviii.

At the very top level, the MDGs articulate fighting poverty

with increasing productivity, and thus poverty with sub-

optimal productivity. The very first Millennium Development

Goal aims to ‘Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger’ and the

very first target listed under MDG 1 to achieve this goal then

aims to ‘Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of

people whose income is less than $1 a day’. By equating

poverty with income, this is as clear an example as possible

of the ways in which the MDGs place what the Sachs report

repeatedly labels ‘the productive life’ right at the heart of

eradicating world poverty. It is the picture of homo

economicus, predicated on ‘…an economic rationality inherent

in all persons’xlix (Williams, 1999: 79). Whilst at times this

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is elaborated into a macro picture of economic development

(for example in Indicator 4 (Target 2, MDG 1), child survival

is explicitly connected to broader efforts to scale up

economic development) most of the time the productive life is

envisaged as something which will have to be embodied at the

individual level in order for the MDGs to be successful. This

opens up an array of potential interventions for bio-political

socio-cultural-spatial engineering which may be more or less

successful.

As with the case of sex, risk, gender and family considered

above, we can see this kind of engineering already at work in

Western development strategies more broadly. Ruckert has noted

how small payments made to families living in poverty to

assist with general health and education costs (what the World

Bank calls ‘conditional cash transfers’), involves an array of

micro-interventions to condition the lives of individual

recipients and their families: ‘…their children attending

school; making regular visits to health clinics; attending

regular educational sessions; and contributing to the upkeep

of the community by volunteering in various areas ... If

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beneficiaries do not comply with their ‘co-responsibilities’

under CCTs, families lose their cash benefits’l

The MDGs provide a rich spectrum for donors and development

professionals to further these kinds of interventions. This is

because it is the individual who is ostensibly identified as

the key productive agent. So, for example hunger must be

eradicated because it effects labour productivity and earning

capacity (Indicator 5, Target 2, MDG 1), whilst gender

disparities must be eradicated in order to increase the

capabilities (productivity) of women (Indicator 9, Target 4,

Goal 3). Even what might be called those more fundamental

aspects constitutive of any number of imagined productive

lives are subsumed to a logic of neo-liberal capitalist

productivity and accumulation: ‘A healthier worker is a more

productive worker, as is a better educated worker. Improved

water and sanitation infrastructure raises output per capita

through various channels, such as reduced illness. So, many of

the Goals are a part of capital accumulation, defined

broadly’li.

30

We see the interventionist potential of framing the individual

as an economically productive agent, as homo economicus, when

the Sachs report turns its attention to education policy. The

report states that ‘…there are few jobs beyond subsistence for

people who are illiterate and innumerate. A lack of education

is thus a sentence to a lifetime of poverty.’ However, this is

only the case in a certain kind of economy, as the report goes

on to admit, for ‘…they cannot earn their way in a competitive

world economy’lii.

Continuing with the theme of education as biopolitical

intervention, this does not simply mean skills transference

but results in a more holistic pedagogical approach concerned

with increasing pluralism and challenging more traditional

modes of thought which may be based on authoritarianism and

hierarchyliii. The point here is not to judge whether this is

desirable or not, but to highlight the socio-cultural-spatial

implications which emerge as a result. So for instance, in his

seminal volume The State in Africa, Jean-Francois Bayart notes the

remarks of a Yoruba planter in Nigeria, who states that ‘At

one time, sons worked for their fathers but today we have

31

schools and civilisation, and fathers now work for their

children’liv. Similarly, Sefa Dei notes how in Ghana ‘…children

who went to “school” were uprooted from their families,

cultures and communities. Their formal learning was

disconnected from the “land” and community to which they

belonged’lv.

As Ilcan and Phillips have already argued, the logics of homo

economicus which run throughout the goals become ‘…key

instruments that privilege and oblige particular conceptions

of knowledge, capacities and actions for social

transformation…[encouraging] certain individuals, groups and

places to reinvent themselves’lvi. It is in this final sense of

spatial reinvention then that we can understand another strand

of the MDGs as producing implications for the individuals and

societies which become the developmental subjects of the MDG

project. In as much as the first two of these aspects (risk,

sex, etc. and homo economicus) have focused largely on the

social and cultural facets of engineering in the MDGs, the

final aspect to be considered below, the city, brings a more

spatial dimension to the discussion.

32

Cities

‘…neoliberalism represents a strategy of political-economic

restructuring that…uses space as its “privileged

instrument”’lvii

MDG 7 (Ensure Environmental Sustainability) target 11 aims

to have achieved by 2020 ‘a significant improvement in the

lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers’. Indicator 32

illustrates that this will be measured against the

‘Proportion of households with access to secure tenure’,

where secure tenure is defined as ‘…households that own or

are purchasing their homes, are renting privately or are

in social housing or sub-tenancy’. By the same logic,

households without secure tenure are defined as ‘…

squatters (whether or not they pay rent), the homeless and

households with no formal agreement’lviii.

The initial MDG documents (i.e. the Millennium Declaration

and the subsequent list of goals, targets and indicators)

are completely absent of any prescription for how the

33

lives of slum dwellers should be improved. Such

prescriptive content is furnished by later reports such as

the Sachs report. The Sachs report firstly establishes

cities as engines for economic productivity. However, in

order to fulfill their potential in this regard the urban

space must facilitate social relations which support

capitalist modes of production and surplus extraction. So

for example, the urban space is necessary to provide ‘the

face-to-face contact vital for a sophisticated division of

labor’. However, this ideal-type urban space is challenged

by migrant workers that come to the cities searching for

jobs that do not normally exist, and thus ‘live in extreme

poverty under slum-like conditions…swell[ing] the ranks of

the informal economy’. It is this informal economy (and

concomitant slum structures which are produced by and

sustain it) which must be abolished for cities to achieve

their true potential as capitalist drivers of economic

growth. The correlation between slums, the informal

economy and capitalist economic growth are made explicit

when the Sachs report states that ‘Improving the lives of

slum dwellers, as called for in the Millennium Development

34

Goals, are essential goods in themselves and necessary for

raising urban productivity’lix (Italics added).

Again though, the nature of this ‘life improvement’ has

specific parameters. Rather than, for example, providing

sanitation, schools, or other social services in the slums

themselves, the Sachs report argues that affordable land

should be made available at the fringes of citieslx. So,

where Partha Chatterjee notes that urban redevelopment has

created conditions in which the urban poor “…will probably

commute long distances because, without the protection of

the old developmental state, they could hardly afford to

live in the city”lxi (Italics added), the Sachs report pre-

empts the potential disruption that such market-driven

social displacement might cause if carried out in an

unregulated and unplanned for manner.

This removal of the poor from city centres has two

implications. Firstly in what might be thought of as a

straightforward process of accumulation by

dispossessionlxii, it opens up prime real estate for private

35

development. Secondly however, and in ways which challenge

the notion that the urban poor are simply treated as

unwanted detritus by the capitalisation of urban space, it

creates the conditions at the edges of cities where the

urban poor can be compartmentalised, monitored, and ‘re-

skilled’ in far more economically productive ways

conducive to the gentrification and maintenance of urban

space. This includes the biopolitical reordering of family

space and relations from the large extended family

networks one finds in many slums, to the more formally

economically productive nuclear family, the only possible

family form which can physically fit into the apartment

units being built on the edges of cities to house former

slum dwellers in.

In this way the urban poor are more easily removed from

the now gentrified city centre whilst still fulfilling

their function as the occupiers of low paid, low skilled

‘formal’ economy jobs. When, as the Sachs report

recommends, new transport services are developed to link

the fringes of the city to the city centre, this is done

36

with no recognition of how ‘modern transport

systems...fundamentally alter the location of industry and

residential areas, and disrupt traditional social

structure’lxiii. And of course, if we understand the aim of

neo-liberal socio-spatial engineering as the production of

the city-space as ‘an arena both for market-oriented

economic growth and for elite consumption practices’lxiv and

to ‘reclaim public spaces for the use of proper

citizens’lxv then the urban poor can be quite literally

whisked away from this space (once they have fulfilled

their role in cleaning, serving and otherwise supporting

the newly engineered city-space) by virtue of, for

instance, irregular or early-finishing train services to

outlying sub-urban areas.

Where this strategy differs from the straightforwardly

exclusionary nature of colonial-era urban planning is in

the compulsion to ‘secure tenure’ inscribed in the MDGs.

By promoting home ownership, the MDGs seek to give a stake

in urban and subsequent suburban capitalist development to

the urban poor, however impoverished and isolated (on the

37

suburban city fringes) that stake might be. As such this

is an inclusive agenda, even though that inclusion is

predicated on intrinsic exclusion and serves the interests

of the urban poor only very narrowly, providing much

larger returns to urban property developers, local

governments and other corporate interestslxvi

Conclusion

This paper has set out to establish the terrain for a much

broader investigation into the successes and failures of

socio-cultural-spatial engineering inscribed in the MDGs and

their associated machinery of representation. Whilst this

paper has taken the MDG texts and their biopolitical

implications as its unit of analysis, future research will

investigate how these strategies deploy ‘on the ground’,

interacting with historical, traditional, cultural and spatial

logics which may prove resistant. Biopolitical and hegemonic

interventions rarely result in expected outcomeslxvii or

materialize without meeting some form of resistancelxviii. As

such, any project exploring the effects of the discourses

discussed in this paper must be cogniscant of the ways in

38

which intended effects may not be apparent and observable

effects unintended. So whilst it has been argued that there is

a logic, and indeed an implicit design underpinning these

discourses, there is also the potential for their effects to

be if not always resisted, then certainly reworked with

mitigating results for the neoliberal developmental project.

This may include outright resistance to interventions in

bodies and places, but may more often resemble something more

unintentional, in terms of Scott’s ship of state (or in this

case, development) running aground on the reefs of resistant

social and cultural practiceslxix. By identifying discourses

which have material effects on men, women, families,

employment and city-spaces, this paper has laid the groundwork

for further research into how productive these discourses have

been, and how their effects may be unintentional. For now,

just one example of these not always intentionally resistant

practices may be the tenants of newly-built tower blocks in

Mumbai, built to re-house the city’s slum-dwelling population

(as proposed by Indicator 32 of the MDGs), throwing their

defecated waste out of the window due to an unfamiliarity with

plumbed toilet systems. This, combined with an increase in

39

youth criminality due to the breaking up of extended families

to fit into small apartments, resulted in a reassessment of

the re-housing programmelxx. These acts are thus not always

necessarily political, yet nonetheless represent small brakes

on the project of neoliberal socio-cultural-spatial

engineering.

40

i A Greig, D Hulme, and M Turner, Challenging Global Inequality: Development Theory and Practice in the 21st Century London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p.131ii A Saith, 'From Universal Values to Millennium Development Goals: Lost in Translation' Development and Change 37(6), 2006, p.1167iii C Gabay, ‘Consenting to 'Heaven': The Millennium Development Goals and civil society in Malawi’, Globalizations 8 (4), 2011, pp.487-501iv For example: the World Bank (www. worldbank .org/ mdgs ); UK Government (www.dfid.gov. uk / mdg / ); US Government (www. usa id.gov/our_work/ mdg ); Oxfam (http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/health_and_education/mdgs.html); ActionAid (www.actionaid.org.uk/899/millennium_development_goals.html - ) v See S Amin ‘The Millennium Development Goals: A Critique from the South’ Monthly Review, March 2006 Edition, www.monthlyreview.org/0306amin.php, accessed on22/10/2009 and Saith, ‘From Universal Values’vi A Zai, ‘The Millennium Development Goals: Back to the Future?’ Third World Quarterly, 32 (1), 2011, pp. 27-43vii See Amin, ‘The Millenium Development Goals’; Gabay, ‘Consenting to Heaven’ pp. 491-492 and D Hulme ‘The Making of the Millennium Development Goals: Human Development meets Results-based Management in an Imperfect World’ Brooks World Poverty Institute Working Paper 16, Manchester: University of Manchester Brooks World Poverty Institute, 2007. This paper adopts the position taken by amongst others David Williams (‘Constructing the Economic Space: The World Bank and the Making of Homo Oeconomicus’ Millennium 28, 1999, pp 79-99), Graham Harrison (‘Economic Faith, Social Project and a Misreading of African Society: the travails of neoliberalism in Africa’ Third World Quarterly 26 (8), 2005, pp 1303-1320), and DavidWilliams and Tom Young (‘Civil Society and the Liberal Project in Ghana and Sierra Leone’ Journal of Intervention and State Building, 2012, Forthcoming). Harrison proposes that the neoliberal developmentalist project assumes that “…there is animmanent free market essence to all societies” (Harrison ‘Economic Faith, SocialProject and a Misreading of African Society p 1307) where self-reliant individuals will “pursue their own particular projects through freely associating with others” (Williams and Young ‘Civil Society and the Liberal Project’). viii A full list of the goals can be found at: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals (accessed on 9th January 2012)ix J Vandemoortele, 'The MDG Story: Intention Denied' Development and Change 42 (1), 2011, p. 4x See Hulme, ‘The Making of the Millennium Development Goals’ and B Sadasivam, 'Wooing the MDG Sceptics' Development, 48 (1), 2005, p.31xi see, for example, R Black and H White Targeting Development: Critical perspectives on the Millennium Development Goals, London, New York: Routledge, 2004; C Fantu C Bradford, The Millennium Development Goals: Raising the Resources to Tackle World Poverty, London: Zed Books, 2005; M McGillivray, Achieving the Millennium Development Goals, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; S Fukuda-Parr, Millennium Development Goals: For a People-Centred Development Agenda, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012xii N Poku and J Whitman, ‘The Millennium Development Goals and Development after2015’ Third World Quarterly, 32 (1), 2011, pp.191-193xiii Hulme, ‘The Making of the Millennium Development Goals’ pp. 2-3xiv Vandemoortele, ‘The MDG Story’ p.8xv Saith, 'From Universal Values’; xvi G Harrisson, (2010) Neoliberal Africa: Global Social Engineering, London: Zed Press, 2010xvii Amin, ‘The Millenium Development Goals’

xviii P Antrobus, ‘MDGs: Most Distracting Gimmicks?’ Convergence, 38 (3), 2005, pp.49–52.xix Saith, 'From Universal Values’ p. 1185xx J Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale: Yale University Press, 1985, p. xvixxi M Wetherell, S Taylor, and S Yates, ‘Introduction’ in M Wetherell, S Taylor, and S Yates, (eds) Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001, p. 4xxii The goals and associated indicators themselves (www.un.org/millenniumgoals/accessed on 26th January 2012); the Millennium Declaration(www.un.org/ millennium / declaration /ares552e.htm  - accessed on 26th January2012), the UN Millennium Project report for the Secretary General (also known asthe ‘Sachs Report) (http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/reports/fullreport.htmaccessed on 26th January 2012); and the Secretary General’s report to the 2010MDG World Summit, ‘Keeping the Promise’(www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/sgreport_draft.pdf accessed on 26th January2012).xxiii M. Foucault, Power in J Faubion (ed), New York: The New Press, 2000, p.122xxiv S R Clegg, Frameworks of Power, London, Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1989, p.37xxv M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p.313xxvi R Ambrahamsen, ‘The power of partnerships in global governance’ Third World Quarterly, 25 (8), 2004, p.1459xxvii J Bachmann ‘Governmentality and counterterrorism – Appropriating international security projects in Kenya’ Journal of Intervention and State Building, Forthcoming, 2012xxviii J Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 19-21xxix D Chandler, 'Globalizing Foucault: From Critique to Apologia - Reply toKiersey and Rosenow', Global Society, 24 (2), 2010, pp.135-142xxx N Kiersey, J Weidner, D Rosenow, ‘Response to Chandler’ Global Society, 24 (2), 2010 pp. 143-150xxxi J Selby, ‘Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits ofFoucauldian IR’ International Relations 21 (3), 2007, pp. 324-345xxxii J Jospehs, ‘What can Governmentality do for IR?’ International Political Sociology, 4 (2), p. 204 xxxiii Foucault, ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ p. 313xxxiv ‘Keeping the Promise’ p.16xxxv ‘Sachs Report’, p.108xxxvi Each MDG is constituted by a sub-set of targets, each with their own subset of indicators. In this paper this will be represented as follows: Indicator x (MDG y, Target z)xxxvii United Nations Development Group (UNDG), Indicators for Measuring the Millennium Development Goals, New York: United Nations Development Group/UN Publications, 2003, pp. 43-46xxxviii UNAIDS, Condom Social Marketing: Selected Case Studies http://data.unaids.org/publications/IRC-pub02/jc1195-condsocmark_en.pdf, 2000 (accessed on 11th November 2011); UNFPA State of World Population: Investing in Adolescents’ Health and Rights http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2003/english/ch1/index.htm , 2003, p. 26 (accessed on 11th November 2011)

xxxix P Griffin, ‘The World Bank, HIV/AIDS and Sex in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Gendered Analysis of Neoliberal Governance’, Globalizations, 8 (2), p. 236.xl R Sabatier Blaming Others: Prejudice Race and Worldwide AIDS, London, Panos Institute, 1988, p.67 xli Griffin, ‘The World Bank’ p.236xlii UNDG ‘Indicators for Measuring’ p.46xliii Griffin ‘The World Bank’ p.239xliv ‘Sachs Report’ p.78xlv ‘Sachs Report’ pp.82-83xlvi ‘Sachs Report’ p.83xlvii See Greig, Hulme, Turner Challenging Global Inequality pp. 153-155, for an overview of these statementsxlviii ‘Sachs Report’ p 2xlix Williams 'Constructing the Economic Space’ p 79l A Ruckert, 'The forgotten dimension of social reproduction: the World Bank andthe poverty reduction strategy paradigm' Review of International Political Economy 17 (5) p.824li ‘Sachs Report’ p 28lii ‘Sachs Report’ p 84liii R Tabulawa, 'International aid agencies, learner centred pedagogy, and political democratisation: A critique' Comparative Education, 39 (1), 2003, p. 22liv J-F Bayart, ‘The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly’ 2nd ed, London:Polity, 2009, p. 108lv G. J. Sefa Dei ‘Learning Culture, Spirituality and Local Knowledge: Implications for African Schooling’ International Review of Education, 48 (5), 2002, p. 341-342lvi S Ilcan and L Phillips, ‘Developmentalities and Calculative Practices: The Millennium Development Goals’ Antipode, 42 (4), 2010, pp. 848-849lvii N Brenner and N Theodore (eds) Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p.viilviii UNDG ‘Indicators for Measuring’ p. 68lix ‘Sachs Report’ p 72-73lx ‘Sachs Report’ p 76lxi P Chatterjee, ‘The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 145lxii D Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007lxiii RB Potter, and S Lloyd-Evans, The City in the Developing World, London, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1998, p. 119lxiv N Brenner and N Theodore ‘Cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”’ in N Brenner and N Theodore (eds) Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 21lxv Chatterjee Politics of the Governed p 131lxvi For a more detailed discussion of the regulatory dynamics of pre and post-colonial of urban housing policy see B Gruffyd-Jones ‘Civilising African Cities:International housing and urban policy from colonial to neoliberal times’ Journal of Intervention and State Building, 2012, Forthcominglxvii Ferguson The Anti-Politics Machinelxviii Scott Weapons of the Weaklxix Scott Weapons of the Weak p xviilxx See the documentary ‘Slumming It’, Channel 4 (2010), available at: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/kevin-mccloud-slumming-it/4od (accessed 9th December 2011)