Inclusive Growth and a Post-2015 Framework

Gina Bergh; Claire Melamed, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Research reports and studies, May 2012, 111 Westminster Bridge Road, London, 9 pages

One of the recurring themes in the debate about the post-2015 agenda is the role that growth and employment issues should play. While there is a great deal of discussion about how to include growth in a new global development framework after 2015, specific proposals remain relatively thin.

Current debates point to three, not mutually exclusive, approaches, tackling different parts of the policy agenda on inclusive growth.

Despite broad consensus that it is desirable to include economic growth and employment in a post-2015 agreement, it is clear that there will be both practical and political challenges to achieving this. Any post-2015 agreement will need to do three things:

Be useful, at a national level or global level, in either driving changes which would otherwise not happen, or in enabling better accountability between governments and people.

Incentivise better policies, by taking on board the learning to date in relevant areas, focusing particularly on those for which negotiations and agreement have proved fruitless in the past.

Be technically viable, by starting with a good understanding of the measurement difficulties in this area and by having a strategy to overcome them.

Achieving all three will not be easy. But the prize, in the form of a new global consensus that brings together both the economic and the social aspects of development change, is considerable. And the task at hand is to chart a course to get there.

Published by ODI