Development

But can you tie it to an SDG, inspired by @mquinnp

As promised yesterday, here is the second part which inspired the cartoon above.

I asked Michael Quinn Patton what he thinks is the biggest challenge evaluators will face over the next five years.

Internationally: The hysterical mania that focuses on SDGs and demands connecting anything and everything to SDG indicators.

Too many sustainable development goals or too few

Chris Lysy

We decided to go with 17 goals and 169 targets...I know many of you wanted less and some of you wanted more...So we decided to go right in the middle, that way nobody is happy.

The age-old question, how many goals should we have? I’m not really caught up on the overall discussion regarding the sustainable development goals, but the following sparked today’s cartoon.

This quote is from Tom Murphy in No surprises in U.N. draft for next global development goals:

The draft document for the goals that will set the global development agenda for the next 15 years came out on Tuesday. If it were a surprise party, the release was like the ones where the person knows it is happening, knows most of the details already and does a poor job pretending to be surprised.

As expected, two unsurprising things happened: 1) the draft contained basically the same 17 goals and 169 targets from previous drafts; 2) a lot of people and groups made clear they are not thrilled with the proposal.

This quote is by Owen Barder from Duncan Green‘s blog post Why 17 goals and 169 targets are not enough:

I’m torn between thinking that complexity implies many targets (your point) and thinking it implies just one or two big hairy ones, to which there are many possible paths. Something in between seems to be the worst of all worlds.

I guess it depends what you think the goals and targets actually do. I suspect there is some international norming, which is useful; and some establishment of a common language, which is also useful. So they are useful for “framing” rather than changing incentives or behaviour directly. This can be important in defining the space within which the complex adaptation occurs

If you are trying to “frame” then you need something that people can get their arms around. I’m not sure how you do that with 17 goals and 169 targets. So I’m more inclined to think that complexity suggests a small number of big targets rather than many targets.

Cartooning Tom Murphy, 7 illustrations on development

Chris Lysy

Outside of my 9 to 5, the topic I get asked about the most is social media. So much so that I’ve started designing and writing a companion blog to this one just to cover the topic. If you’re interested I’ll have more info about in the next few weeks.

My first piece of advice when I get questions about blogging is to stop worrying about the tech, start reading other blogs and just start writing. To help that process I’ve decided to occasionally highlight some of my favorite bloggers by cartooning some of their ideas.

For this week’s post I’m cartooning Tom Murphy, who blogs at A View From The Cave. Tom does a really good job of pulling together larger discussions. He approaches topics with a critical eye and is always in search of evidence.

We had a short Skype chat a few weeks ago talking about such topics as social entrepreneurship, microfinance, and labor laws. The following cartoons were inspired both by that conversation and posts which Tom has written.

About the illustrations

The setup is a little different this week. Instead of giving you a blurb prior to each cartoon I put a link to a post Tom’s written about related topics.

Like usual, please feel free to use the cartoons in presentations, blog posts, etc.

p.s. I sent out a set of exclusive cartoons to my email list yesterday morning. If you like my work and want to see all my cartoons I suggest signing up because I plan to do more exclusives in the future.