Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko and David Hulme. "International Norm Dynamics and the 'End of Poverty': Understanding the Millennium Development Goals". Global Governance, Vol.17, No.1 (2011): 17-36.

Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko and David Hulme. "International Norm Dynamics and the 'End of Poverty': Understanding the Millennium Development Goals". Global Governance, Vol.17, No.1 (2011): 17-36.

• A significant evolution of policy in the post-Cold War era has been the consensus that eliminating poverty is the major goal of international development. This axiom is institutionalized in the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] (17).
• Goals for international development in previous decades were not so clearly defined, nor did they mainly focus on poverty. Although poverty has been recognized as a major international issue since the 1950s, most development programs focused on infrastructure development and industrialization until the 1970s, liberalization throughout the 1980s, and other administrative reforms until the late 1990s (17).
• Although individual aspects of poverty, like reduced access to education or poor health, had been addressed, these aspects had remained distinct until the 1990s, when events like the 1995 World Social Summit in Copenhagen actually recognized poverty as a multi-sectoral phenomenon (18-19).
• The Millennium goals have a very distinct emphasis on poverty as the major subject of development and activities and focus on this to the exclusion of other aspects of development. The authors argue that the MDGs act as a vehicle for the 'supernorm', made up of smaller field-specific norms, that extreme poverty is inhuman and degrading (18).
• The authors borrow the norm identification used by Drs. Finnemore and Sikkink to classify actors into norm emergence, cascade, and internationalization phases (19-20).
• The norm entrepreneurs identified are Jim Grant, director of UNICEF, who organized a large conference to discuss the intersection of multiple forces on the conditions of child poverty, and Nafis Sadik, director of the UNFPA, who also pursued broader objectives contributing to population health. A number of other organizations, both international and private, as well as core Western powers, were also critical to the new norm of poverty-focused development (20-22).
• The authors posit that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan deliberately made the new norm of poverty-focused development explicit and demonstrative through its proclamation in the MDGs. The formalization of the MDGs gave the norm legitimacy and helped hold states accountable to trigger a norm cascade (22-23).
• The development of the MDGs was not generally driven by the personal motivation and moralism that typically motivates norm entrepreneurs in the model. Instead, the authors term these technocrats who created the MDGs as 'message entrepreneurs', who translate norms into effective campaigns because of organizational demands rather than altrusim (24-25).
• At one level the cascade process for the MDGs was really simple, as they were given full formal support by all countries and the UNGA. On the other hand, the UN put a lot of work into actually translating opinions into action and solidifying the commitment of member states to the goals (25).
• There were some objections to the MDGs: namely that NGOs said they were too limited and did not contain many of the more controversial reforms suggested by NGOs, and that developing countries complained that it was nothing new in development programs (26).
• The MDGs were rapidly adopted and internalized by a multiplicity of actors, with its goals adopted by various development organizations and other agencies, NGOs, donors, and state agencies incorporating MDGs into the language of their reports (28).
• A large part of the reason that the MDGs were an effective form of securing poverty eradication globally was because they focused on end goals rather than methods. Even between the UN, IMF, and World Bank, there are disputes over the methods of poverty eradication, meaning that the end-state focus of the document helped it succeed in multiple contexts (25).
• Specialists, NGOs, and many liberal developed countries have complained that a number of omissions from the MDGs, foremost among them being the omission of goals for reproductive health services that had been blocked by conservative Catholic and Muslim countries. The goals also ignored growth of democracy, and sidelined some issues of gender equality, youth employment, and environmental standards (27-28). 
• The present configuration of the MDGs reflects a conflict between norm entrepreneurs and message entrepreneurs, as the first group tries to include more goals into the document, while the latter attempts to slim down the list so that goals can remain simple and concrete (29).
• Many of these omissions are the result of politicking by message entrepreneurs who try to smooth over or ignore any of divides within the policy community. As a result, the divides over methods of poverty reduction are omitted, to avoid the debate over neoliberalism between the UNDP and IMF (29-31).
• "Complex, multiple goal norms are best understood as supernorms— carefully structured sets of interrelated norms that pursue a grand prescriptive goal" (31).