Transcript
ANN FLORINI: For quite some years, governments around the world have been in the habit of setting goals for the world. They sign these major declarations saying we're going to achieve wonderful things on reducing poverty, educating children, ending war, et cetera, et cetera. The reason they do this is because there are obviously some pretty big problems that need that kind of attention and governments want to be seen to be doing something about them.
Unfortunately, the being-seen part seems to be more important for most of them than the doing part. But there hasn't been until recently any way to get a handle on the size of the gap between these lofty aspirations that keep getting put forward in these international declarations and what is actually being done on the ground to achieve those lofty goals.
So several years ago, we created the Global Governance Initiative as a way of trying to get a handle on the size of that gap. The way the project works is we have identified six major issue areas drawing from a series of international declarations—primarily the United Nations Millennium Declaration from 2000, but several others as well—and identified what are the goals that essentially all of the world's governments have signed on to saying this is what the world ought to be trying to achieve.
The best-known of these are the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs, which call for the world to achieve very specific targets on poverty, education, health, and hunger by the year 2015. But there's a series of others as well, on peace and secretary, on environment, on human rights, and all of those are covered within the GGI.
We use these goals as opposed to making up stuff ourselves, because these are the ones that have been legitimated by the world's governments. We're not saying what the world should be trying to do; we're merely holding the world accountable for whether it is doing what it said it wants to be doing.
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