Introduction: positioning development ethics after the Millennium Development Goals

The year 2015 will mark the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Met with great fanfare in international policy-making circles with the UN Millennium Declaration in 2000, the MDGs have sought to ameliorate the condition of countless poor around the world by focusing on attainable targets relating to their quality of life (broadly on health and disease, education, gender equality and the environment). For its part the UN General Assembly vowed to ‘spare no effort’ to promote ‘respect for all internationally recognised human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to development’ (UN, 2000, Sec V-24). This new policy framework found its normative justifications in the Human Capabilities Approach (HCA), an idea of justice that takes freedom and capabilities as central to its articulation of the good. In a development context, people are seen as ‘shaping their own destiny, and not just as passive recipients of the fruits of cunning development plans’ (Sen, 1999, p 53). Sen’s articulation of freedom as the constitutive basis for well-being in human development and the practical applications of this foundational premise that were realised through his association with Mahbub ul Haq have made him the single leading justice theorist in the field of development ethics (Gasper and Truong, 2010, p 69).

At a structural level, however, critics of the MDGs raise the doubt that they have served only to depoliticise and compartmentalise aspects of human life and experience into discrete goals, thus ignoring the interconnectedness of many of those aspects with respect to inequality and deprivation. Reflecting a neoliberal logic that ‘colonises’ everyday practices and narrows recognition of these realities to discrete statistical measures, these goals and targets provide a ‘superficial treatment of complex issues, and [abstract] them from structural inequalities and the specificities of place’ (Wilson, 2014, p 6; see also Saith, 2006). Furthermore, these structures obfuscate relationships of care and caring that occur beneath (and despite) them. These caringscapes (McKie et al, 2002) constitute ‘informal interdependencies across the lifecourse, at different spatial scales, [that] can be enacted through a variety of forms of communication, including expressive embodiment’ (McEwan and Goodman, 2010, p 105).