Assisting development = assisting what, precisely? All around are the signs and sounds of a steady gearing up for the renewed development debate. Before it gets swamped by a demand for commitments based on GDP percentages, targets and indicators, it would be a good idea to reflect a little on what we really mean by development. Renewed debate Among the harbingers of renewed debate, there's the first meeting of the UN High Level Panel on development last week , the UN's post-2015 global consultation and various other statements and discussions getting going, and the attack in Britain on the ring-fencing of development aid as a government budget item, as I reported in my post of 24 September. Though this is a discussion of development, much of it is going to be explicitly about aid and much of the rest will be implicitly about it. Donor governments, development aid agencies and a lot of recipient governments and agencies all join in bringing two connected subjects of discussion -- what is development and, secondly, how do we best aid it? -- into one blurred whole. The acme of this elision is the Millennium Development Goals . And it is the MDG achievement deadline of 2015 that is largely responsible, as it approaches, for the renewed activity. The MDG conundrum The MDGs represent an international near-consensus on development. Staking out commitments for progress on poverty and hunger, education, child and maternal health, gender equality, HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability and a global partnership for economic