ABSTRACT
The deadline for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that world leaders blessed in 2000 arrived in 2015. Following extensive consultations, papers, meetings, and negotiations, a new architecture for global development, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emerged, also with a fifteen-year time frame. The chapter explores the global architecture of international development against the backdrop of global transformations. It sketches ideas that gave rise to the complex array of institutions—multilateral and national, public and private—working to end poverty and advance social justice. The chapter explores how this "system" of institutions and efforts to govern works. It introduces the actors involved in development and asks how their interventions shape and are shaped by evolving systems as global challenges and forces call into question underlying assumptions and institutions. The chapter concludes by returning to the fundamental challenge that development represents, and whether and how "global governance" aptly describes either the ends involved or the means in place to meet them.
