I am in New York for the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On Monday morning, the delegates from the UN member states will officially finalize the talks about how the targets set for 2015 can be met, despite the lack of progress in some (others would say many) respects and despite the setbacks that the financial and other crises have caused. Contrary to other summits – the most notorious: Copenhagen, climate change – this will be a ritual; the final statement was agreed upon last week.

This so-called ‘outcome document’ will probably be adopted by the assembled delegates first thing on Monday morning. That is not to say that the rest of the three-day summit is unimportant: the heads of the individual member states will give their speeches, which will either be supportive and try to push things a little further, or slightly critical of the outcome. This will give an idea of how serious they are.

This blog will not be about the exact proceedings, the statements, the who said what, the ’news’ and so on; there are hundreds of other journalists and pundits walking around here who will provide the soundbites and summaries of what, in the end and at least in its public form, will be merely rhetoric.

What we will try to do is provide some background, by inviting specialists, policy makers, academics and civil-society representatives to give their views. These will be published in separate posts on our special MDG blog: Goal Posts - What Next for the MDGs?

I think that several debates will mix together, or go separately in distinct policy or academic circles, during and after this summit. With such a broad and complex subject matter, that is logical, but at the same time confusing. One of the aims of this blog is to provide some clarity, some categorization of these several lines of debate.

I will try to do this in later blog posts, but one observation is quite easy: there is a very obvious divide between discussions about the current era until 2015, and the post-2015 discussion. The summit focuses on the current MDGs: what can we do to realize the promises world leaders made in 2000? This is endorsed by all of the UN organizations, by many of the national delegations, and by many NGOs. And it is a logical choice: why talk about the future if we cannot even manage to reach our actual targets? And, after all, a summit like this is not about new arguments, about research, about content: it is about politics, it is about pushing the powerful and the responsible to do more to reach the eight MDGs. It is about creating political momentum, about forcing politicians and others to act.

All kinds of comments and positions are welcome on this Broker blog, if they are well sourced and built on arguments. They can be about reaching the current MDGs, or about where we should head after 2015. However, we do have our own priority. It is not a coincidence that I use the same title for this blog post as we used for the debate The Broker organized during the first half of this year. For us, this online discussion is part of an ongoing search for a new, more adequate narrative, discourse, paradigm, political project, a global development strategy, call it what you want … a comprehensive and coherent set of ideas, institutional settings, theories and practices that can guide processes of change at the global, the national and the local level. One that provides concrete opportunities to act, to increase pressure on those that impede change, and to erase those obstacles and structures that keep power relations as they are.

You can pick up an enormous variety of opinions, initiatives and ideas by walking in and around the UN premises in New York and visiting the official and the side events. One of the remarkable – though very familiar – things is that there is not much real exchange between those operating here – UN and other multilateral organizations, all sorts of NGOs, academics – in terms of trying to find some form of synergy. Many organizations present their own ‘flagship report’, others try to get their specific advocacy item higher on the agenda, some simply want to have their own voice or interest heard.

At the same time, some of those people and organizations try to go beyond the short term and the direct interests or policy aims. They sincerely try to think through and propose alternatives. Our special aim at this summit is to seek out these proposals and these people, and see what is common (or not) in their endeavours.

In this respect, there is already one suggestion I can make. I found it very inspiring to read the 'Moving beyond the Millennium Development Goals: A more honest conversation?' opinion piece by Phil Vernon and Deborrah Baksh on the Open Democracy website. We are pleased that Phil also wrote a post for our blog, in which he refers to a report he has published. Read it for yourself. What I found very useful were his concrete suggestions for ‘a common framework within which different perspectives can be compared, and used to inspire progress and hold development actors accountable for their actions and progress’. That is a much better way to phrase it than I did in the above paragraphs.

Phil and Deborrah write that such a new framework needs to be ready in 2014, ‘in time to replace the MDGs’; I would say that we do not have that much time. My guess is that the follow-up MDG summit that, according to the outcome document, is planned to take place in 2013, is the event where the Post-2015 targets will be agreed upon. The summit will not go into this debate about a global development strategy for after 2015. But it asks – which means orders – the secretary-general of the UN to start investigations about the new course to be followed. An opportunity for both supporters and critics of the MDGs to push things in the right direction.

This post will be simultaneously published on The Broker MDG blog: Goal Posts – What Next for the MDGs?