Global Institutions

Since their inception in 2000, The Millennium Development Goals have revolutionized the global aid business, using specific targets to help mobilize and guide development efforts. They have encouraged world leaders to tackle multiple dimensions of poverty simultaneously and provided a standard for judging performance. As their 2015 expiration looms, the time has come to bank those successes and focus on what comes next.

Palestinian statements that the recent UN vote to grant Palestine nonmember observer status will save the peace process are vacuous -- as pointless as the hand-wringing among U.S. and Israeli officials about the move's death blow to negotiations. After all, it is impossible to revive what is dead, just as it is impossible to kill it again.

Despite high expectations and an ambitious agenda, the Rio+20 Conference failed to deliver meaningful progress on environmental issues. Fortunately, government inaction is not the whole story: the private sector, NGOs, and civil society groups are working to fill the void.

For decades, the WHO has debated whether to address specific diseases or to broadly strengthen healthcare systems. With the increasing threat of noncommunicable diseases, however, the WHO has to double down on the latter, and convince states that health concerns are integral to decisions about trade, agriculture, and urban planning -- the whole of government.