ABSTRACT
The Millennium Development Goals (mdgs) constitute a normative consensus in the development community at the beginning of the 21st century. This article examines that consensus from the perspective of poststructuralist discourse analysis by situating it in its historical context, comparing the Millennium Declaration with the UN International Development Strategy of 1970. The article illustrates the depoliticising bias of the main mdg documents and interprets the shift in favour of market-oriented solutions and non-antagonistic conceptions of global community as the principal manifestations of a significant shift in development discourse.
