Leaders from around the world gathered in New York last month to discuss the replacements for the Millennium Development Goals, which expire next year. The topics included human rights, economic development, justice, disarmament, and terrorism, just to name a few. And that’s a problem, says Genevieve Maricle, policy adviser to the U.S. Ambassador at the U.S. Mission to the UN, in this week’s podcast.

Leaders from around the world gathered in New York last month to discuss the replacements for the Millennium Development Goals, which expire next year. The topics included human rights, economic development, justice, disarmament, and terrorism, just to name a few. And that’s a problem, says Genevieve Maricle, policy adviser to the U.S. Ambassador at the U.S. Mission to the UN, in this week’s podcast.

“There are so many really good arguments for why thousands of issues need to be part of this agenda,” Maricle says. “That’s one reason we ended up with 169 targets and 17 goals; it’s because this isn’t an easy question.”

But focus is badly needed.

She cites an example of the current goal to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which was kept in the next round of goals, but in the “eleventh and a half hour, [the working group] added, ‘and other communicable diseases.’ So now we are left with a target that literally takes on every disease that the world faces.”

“We as a community, both civil society and government and private sector, know how to do better than that,” she says, “and we have to hold ourselves to be more precise than that, to be more rigorous in how we set our own priorities.”

Integrating Goals?

Prioritization is instrumental to creating a development agenda that is manageable, measurable, and actionable, Maricle says. “We have to ask those questions about, ‘Who are the right actors and how do we determine an agenda that’s based on that, and how do we know that not putting something in this agenda doesn’t mean we don’t care about it?’”

Some criteria for focus were discussed at the Rio+20 Conference in 2012, which concluded that goals should be limited in number, universally relevant, action-oriented, and easy to communicate. But Maricle says that there’s still more to do to make the post-2015 goals manageable. It’s critical what’s included is measurable and achievable, for example. “If we do a thorough analysis of the evidence base of it, what do we end up with as the answers for what we can actually effect change on?”

Combining goals could help make things more manageable. “Our goal isn’t to figure out which aren’t important,” Maricle says. “Our goal is to figure out how to either integrate or consolidate ideas to bring them together and collectively get to action…or it’s to figure out what we’re most effective at.”

For example, drawing from her experience working on issues of peace and governance, Maricle cites a UNESCO study that estimates more than 28 million children are not in school in countries that are emerging from conflict. “If we’re going to set a goal that says we are going to get to universal primary education, we will not get there if we don’t deal with issues of conflict and of peace,” she says. Integrating targets on peace and governance into the goal of achieving universal primary education could mean that more students are able to go to school.

A Turn to Multilateralism

Focusing also requires a discussion about which goals should be the burden of governments and which should be the responsibility of other organizations, Maricle says. “We have to be able to know that we can have another system, or a system that’s complementary to this, to flag critical issues without needing to have them be part of this.”

The concept of multilateralism is really the crux of the post-2015 development agenda, she says. “You can’t achieve any of these complex things without it being about cooperation.” This cooperation includes not only state actors, but also civil society and private sector engagement.

Ultimately, the future of multilateralism and the role of the UN will be tested by the success or failure of the post-2015 development agenda, Maricle says.

“If we can’t do this well in the next year and a half and the 15 years that follow, we will be potentially – I mean, this sounds sort of alarmist – we will potentially be calling into question what the UN is all about and what multilateralism is all about in the first place.”