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Nasir Khan, University of Auckland, New Zealand
intervention, enhancement of resources and
opportunities could stimulate little change.
Similarly, women’s say in decision about children,
inadequate dietary provisions, excessive domestic
workload and obsessive desires for male children are
fundamental factors relating to the personal
circumstances but the goal of improving maternal
health remains almost exclusively immersed in the
space of resources, with the slight exception of the
adolescent birth rates which addresses the conversion
factor. Both these goals of targeting infant mortality and
maternal health require action beyond what is
warranted by a neoclassical approach of supply and
demand. Some of these depravations require education,
other information and still other economic
empowerments, but none of these receive a mention
either in the targets or the indicators.
The target of halting and reversing the spread of
HIV/AIDS by 2015 comes closest to the CA ideal. It
covers the space of personal circumstances by
strategizing knowledge about its spread; addresses the
space of resources by targeting the prevalence of
condoms use, and concentrates on the conversion
factors by incorporating access for those in advanced
stages of the HIV/AIDS to antiretroviral drugs and
access of orphans to schools. Predictably, the results
achieved under this goal are also most commendable. It
is, however, surprising that the same breadth of vision
is not extended to the indicators for halting and
reversing the spread of malaria and other diseases,
which mainly concentrate on enlarging the space of
resources.
What this assessment of the MDG’s reveals is a pervasive
neglect of the space of personal circumstances across all its
targets and indicators. A compulsive preoccupation with the
space of resources and conversion factor is symptomatic of
the neoclassical undercurrents which permeate both its
vision and targets: enmeshed in supply and demand
intricacies and unflustered by distributional concerns.
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