Resumo

The present study focuses on the evaluation of the results on the MDG from consolidated data. The establishment of the MDGs was a normative innovation among UN member countries, whose most widespread development monitoring system was, and may still be, the Human Development Index (HDI). The components that make up the HDI and the targets derived from the MDGs have compatibilities in their conceptions, except for the innovations of the MDGs related to the environment and to global governance, which were absent in the systematization of the HDI.

The present study contributes to this discussion, including the analyses in the most populous municipalities of the Northeast in the period 2000–2015, with the objective of evaluating the MDG associations with the HDI and the public administration models in Brazil’s Northeast. In this sense, The importance of this research lies in guiding decisions by local government administration. The present study contributes to the management of sustainability discuss by indicating the appropriateness of a public administration model to approach the goals.

The United Nations held the Millennium Summit in September 2000, in which the MDGs were systematized (Rezende, 2008), being presented as an international normative innovation. The HDI, developed by the United Nations Development Program in 1990, is the best-known example of a tool for measuring the social dimension of development (Siedenberg, 2003). Giddens (2008) describes the patrimonialist and bureaucratic administration models. According to Paula (2005), there are two political projects that compete for implementation spaces in the country: a managerial aspect and a societal one.

The present work is a descriptive study, since it seeks to describe a certain reality (Cooper and Schindler, 2003). This study adopts a mixed methods approach (Creswell, 2009). First, a quantitative approach was used to examine the results and associations of the MDGs and HDI in the municipalities of the Northeast region of the country. For the data collection in the qualitative approach of the research, documents with records on the actions of the municipalities with better performances in the MDGs were accessed.

The strongest correlation between the MDG and HDI was the moderated connection between literacy level and poverty reduction. The Proposition 1 of this study was refuted, since it did not find strong associations between the evolution of the results on the MDG and the HDI in Brazil’s Northeast municipalities. The Proposition 2 was refuted too, since the documents analysed about the three municipalities with betters performances on the basic sanitaion target didn't show convergences in their public administration models.

The evolution of trajectories in each of the development goals are independent of each other, requiring specific policies for each. Thus, municipal public administrations in the Northeast that strategically prioritize targets in certain areas, with the justification that this will have positive impacts on others, will experience lower evolutions in the broader development indices in the long term. Municipalities whose administration recognizes the equal importance of all goals, taking a societal view, and assign equal importance to developing structures to meet each one, will fare much better.

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