“Targets for good governance, better job opportunities, environmental stability and less inequality need to sit alongside more traditional development goals as policymakers create a new agenda to follow the Millennium Development Goals, a survey of more than a million people around the world indicates,” the Thomson Reuters Foundation reports. “Just as important, those targets must for the first time apply to rich countries as well as poor, respondents said,” the news service writes, adding, “Rich nations, for instance, might be tasked with doubling their energy efficiency or cutting their disproportionate use of the world’s resources, according to the survey, released on Tuesday by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).”

“The UNDP consultation, carried out over the past year online, in national discussions and in door-to-door visits in 90 countries, aimed to assess what people see as priorities in replacing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expire in 2015,” the news service notes, adding, “The survey results aim to feed into an ongoing U.N. process to craft new ‘post-2015’ development goals over the next two and a half years. It is due to gain fresh momentum later this month at a special event towards achieving the MDGs at the U.N. General Assembly in New York.” The news service continues, “The new survey indicates that many people ‘continue to care deeply about’ the MDGs — particularly on education and health care — and want these issues to be part of any new post-2015 development targets, [Olav Kjorven, U.N. assistant secretary general and director of the Bureau of Development Policy at UNDP,] said” (Goering, 9/10).