Global Governance Campaigning and MDGs: From top-down to bottom-up anti-poverty work

What should be the foundational campaigning demands for those attempting to eradicate Third World poverty? The Millennium Development Goals are popular, serving in 2005 to motivate the British Make Poverty History movement, the Live8 consciousness-raising rock concerts and the Johannesburg-based Global Call to Action Against Poverty. Yet, upon closer inspection, the implementation processes associated with the mdgs have serious weaknesses. They were generated non-transparently by the United Nations, itself moving since the early 2000s to embrace the Washington Consensus and co-operate with the World Bank, to 'bluewash' the world's largest corporations with its Global Compact, to endorse 'Type 2' public-private partnership privatisation strategies, to condone US militarism, and to reject even elementary democratic reform. The main decisions at the Monterrey and Doha finance and trade summits were biased against poor people, workers, women and the environment. Aspirational targets like the mdgs are, in any case, far less important than the actual social struggles underway across the world for basic needs and democracy. As shown in the 2005 campaigns, work on mdgs distracts us from solidarity with the real agents of progressive social and environmental history, in progressive civil society.