The Post-2015 Development Framework and the Realization of Women's Rights and Social Justice

The analysis offers reflections on the post-2015 development framework, based on their views of the strengths and weaknesses of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) development framework, key changes since 2000, and ideas on how to address the challenges of the post-2015 period. It is from the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), Rutgers University, New Jersey, United States.

The document finds that the strength of the MDG framework was its focus on timebound goals and targets for important outcomes, which had the potential to help people to hold their governments and international agencies to account. It then lists the weakness of the MDG framework - some relating to communication, gender, and rights issues - including, among others, that the MDG goals, targets, and indicators:

• "Became linked to aid conditionality, and linked to enabling donor governments to monitor recipient governments, rather than enabling citizens to monitor their governments;
• Implied that the route to meeting the targets was through ‘interventions’ financed at least in part by aid;
• Formulated the goal of promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment without a focus on realizing women’s rights, providing no safeguards against ‘equalizing down’ and giving no substance to the ambiguous term ‘empowerment’;
• Reduced this goal to parity in educational enrollment in primary and secondary schooling, supplemented by indicators of women’s share of seats in national parliaments, and share of non-agricultural paid employment;
• Detached development from the international normative framework and accountability mechanisms provided by human rights (although the Millennium Declaration had made this link)."

Key changes since 2000 are listed, including  weakened human rights: "Human rights, and especially women’s rights, have been weakened by the growth of claims that they purely individual rights that are at odds with 'traditional cultural values' that put more value on collectivities."

The document calls for reframing the post-2015 development agenda. Since macroeconomic policies are critical to rights and desirable development, as demonstrated by regression in social and economic rights since the 2008 financial crisis, it recommends concrete policy guidance within the post-2015 framework. "The new agenda must break away from the sterile donor/recipient framework and it must offer a new understanding of development and partnerships and a clear understanding of the enabling macroeconomic environment required to achieve the new objectives....

A new understanding of development needs to be framed in terms of the achievement of social justice, and development partnerships as the cooperation of governments, international agencies, businesses, and civil society organizations to achieve social justice.... A post MDG development framework must emphasize that the realization of human rights is not an optional extra, but as something to which every Finance Minister, every Planning Commission, every Minster for Trade, Industry and Agriculture, every Central Bank, must pay attention."

There is a recognition of the private sector as a key driver of development and a need for more coordination in governance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, as well as G20 response coordination.

On gender issues in the post-2015 development framework: "Within a human rights oriented post-2015 development framework, gender issues should be addressed in terms of the realization women’s rights (as spelt out in all the human rights treaties, economic, social and cultural, as well as civil and political); and gender equality should be addressed in relation to the Convention Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)....If there is to be another set of internationally agreed goals, the gender goal should be ‘realize women’s rights, including economic, social and cultural, as well as civil and political rights’..... [A]ll countries should be subject to monitoring in the post-2015 development framework....One possibility is for indicators to be determined on a regional and subregional basis, so that countries are benchmarked against similar countries with indicators."