Discoursive Alibis: Human rights, millennium development goals and poverty reduction strategy papers

Abstract

Susan Mathews examines the complex and largely unsettled relationship between the millennium development goals (MDGs), poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) and human rights discourse, partly through analysing the proposal that PRSPs be aligned to MDGs. A major risk is that the MDGs and PRSPs aligned create an amalgam of policy formulae that bring together the goal stringency of the former and the macroeconomic and structural reform orthodoxy of the latter, which could seriously hamper poverty reduction and disempower low-income countries and its poor peoples.