What's Millennial about the MDGs? Discursive Boundaries of Public Health in Southeast Asia

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goals are framed within the post-war discourses of development that also gave us Basic Human Needs and Human Security. The Goals set out a consideration of the failures of earlier strategies along with an agenda for the accelerated reduction of poverty and its accompanying human insecurities. Though the more critical aspects of the MDG discourse were sorely needed, they also left space for the repetition of earlier top–down development strategies, and, more generally, for a (re)vision and wider implementation of globalised intervention by developed countries into the less-developed. In this discourse developed countries identify needs on the part of the less-developed and then supply these needs. The ‘need’ discourse focussed on here represents inferior public health that requires services, goods and equipment to be provided by developed countries; what it ignores are negative health consequences that can arise from development schemes themselves.