What are the implications of the global crisis and its aftermath for developing countries, 2010-2020?

Some major game changers beyond the recent economic crisis and food/fuel crisis will have an impact on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to 2015 and afterwards. Futureproofing the MDGs is about thinking how future(s) might impact the Goals, MDG gains, costs, strategies and opportunities for faster progress on poverty reduction. Scenarios - multiple coherent and plausible futures - are a vehicle both for acting on possible future(s) and interpreting their implications. This paper explores the implications for growth and poverty reduction in developing countries of four futures scenarios to address the following question: What are the implications of the global financial crisis and its aftermath, regionally and globally, for developing countries, taking a 5 - 10 year view? The scenarios and modelling were developed through interviews and workshops with a range of stakeholders in the United Kingdom, India and Kenya. This paper takes a structured approach to reviewing outcomes for growth, poverty reduction and the MDGs for different developing economies, against the background of the post-crisis context. The scenarios were developed using a version of the morphological scenarios approach, field anomaly relaxation (FAR). This creates a backdrop of internally consistent futures for policy formation and decision making by identifying and analysing the most significant drivers of change in the global financial and political systems. The scenarios are closely connected to a soft model that identifies possible pathways, causal linkages and transmission variables between the scenarios and associated levels of economic growth and poverty reduction via key economic variables. This permits more granular interpretation of the scenario outcomes than conventional scenario-analysis techniques. This work was funded by DFID (the futures mapping) and UNDP (the annex MDG review).