Devi Sridhar’s book The Battle Against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance, and the World Bank makes the Foreign Affairs syllabus on foreign aid.  In ‘What to Read on Foreign Aid‘, John Gershman describes the book as a ‘richly textured’ ethnography, writing:

‘Sridhar provides both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a World Bank–funded nutrition program in India that, despite a lack of evidence for its effectiveness, has become the blueprint for similar programs elsewhere. She shows how the political objectives of both Indian policymakers and nutrition-policy advocates within the World Bank explain the expansion and replication of a program that fails to address the social conditions responsible for undernutrition in India and other countries.’

For more, see Devi Sridhar’s publications or visit GEG’s Global Health Governance project.

The success or failure of the Copenhagen climate change negotiations will depend not only on the substance of the deal but on the spirit and message of the talks as well, writes Arunabha Ghosh in his latest GEG blog post Making Copenhagen count. Four big questions will dominate: Who participates in the deal? How will it be implemented? Who will pay? And how will the private sector and civil society respond? Read more at the GEG blog and in Dr Ghosh’s latest op-ed Even climate is about money.

For more GEG research, see our new Climate Change Governance resource guide.

In launching the initiative, the Taskforce’s Honorary Advisors emphasised the scope of global knowledge governance challenges at hand…Read more

GEG and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) have published a new study of WTO reform proposals since 1995, by Carolyn Deere-Birkbeck and Catherine Monagle.

To download the report and read more about this project, visit Strengthening Multilateralism. Or visit ICTSD’s page on the report.

Three articles by Carolyn Deere-Birkbeck were recently published. Two articles were each part of a new book and one article appeared in the November Special Issue of International Affairs.

1. Deere-Birkbeck, Carolyn (2009) “Global Governance in the Context of Climate Change: The Challenges of Increasingly Complex Risk Parameters”, International Affairs, 85 (6) November, pp.1173-1194.
2. Deere-Birkbeck, Carolyn (2009) “Reinvigorating Debate on WTO Reform: A Functional and Normative Approach to Analyzing the WTO System” in Redesigning the World Trade Organization for the Twenty-first Century, edited by D. Steger, Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press/Centre for International Governance Innovation/International Development Research Centre. This chapter was also published as a GEG Working paper which you can find here.
3. Deere, Carolyn (2009) “Reforming Governance to Advance the WIPO Development Agenda” in Implementing the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Development Agenda, edited by J. de Beer, Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press/Centre for International Governance Innovation/International Development Research Centre. You can find the chapter by Carolyn Deere here.