Targets have become an important preoccupation with international co-operation agencies over the last decade, just as they have with domestic governments in several OECD countries. This Policy Arena is principally concerned with targeting in the education sector, though many of the issues discussed are multi-sectoral in their relevance. As this introduction argues, whilst internationally-driven targets suggest that a new global consensus has emerged which stresses the importance of ending global poverty with education playing a key role (Black and White, 2003), it appears that these targets are in fact imposing new, perhaps more oblique, forms of conditionality for developing countries.
As with other international targets, education targets are not new and have been discussed, refined and redefined in different arenas-including in relation to International Development Targets (IDTs) set by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, and at World Education Conferences in Jomtien and Dakar in 1990 and 2000, respectively. At these, ministers of education together with international development partners set a broad range of targets within the area of Basic Education. Aspects of these targets were duly captured in the two Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were agreed by the international community in September 2000 at the UN in New York. We should note, however, as Colclough illustrates, that these two education MDGs have significantly narrowed the focus of the EFA targets towards primary schooling specifically. This raises an important cause for concern amongst educationalists of a skewing of external aid and of national budgets towards just one sub-sector, rather than balanced development of the sector as a whole.