The GEG lecture by Mr. Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, President of European Socialist Party and former Prime Minister of Denmark, is now available online via the University of Oxford’s OpenSpires project.
To listen to the audio or watch the video of The post-crisis politics of financial reform: business as usual or new global order?, visit the OpenSpires project. You can also find it on iTunes U and via the University of Oxford’s podcasts.
Stop aid. Increase aid. Reform aid. The debate about aid and its effectiveness (or lack thereof) received new impetus when Dambisa Moyo, former World Bank and Goldman Sachs economist, proclaimed that aid to Africa simply doesn’t work in her book Dead Aid.
In our new GEG Guide we survey the aid debate, looking beyond Moyo and other well-known contributors to also include voices from the margins. You’ll find our aid ‘must reads’ as well as links to the GEG blog series on the aid debate.
Read more in the GEG Guide to the (Dead) Aid Debate.
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.
In advance of the First Global Ministerial Meeting on Road Traffic Safety hosted by the Russian Government in Moscow, Kevin Watkins and Devi Sridhar have published a report outlining why now is the critical time for action. As Lord Robertson says in the forward to the report, ’This briefing paper provides conference delegates with powerful arguments for why road safety must become a development and health priority’.
To read more, download the full report. Details of the press release are available at the FIA Foundation.
Technology transfer holds the key to a substantive agreement in Copenhagen, argue Arunabha Ghosh and Kevin Watkins in a new GEG working paper. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change: Why Financing for Technology Transfer Matters takes aim at the current deadlock between developed and developing countries over the timing, pace and distribution of commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. With a real risk that this impasse will be Copenhagen’s deal-breaker, Ghosh and Watkins present a solution for negotiators: create a Low Carbon Technology and Finance Facility (LCTFF) to fund the immediate, large-scale transfer of clean coal technology to China and India.
For more, download Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change in full and read commentary in The Guardian’s Countdown to Copenhagen.
People in developing countries are suffering disproportionately from this global financial crisis, and international institutions have a long way to go to ensure the financing and mechanisms of assistance that can address this development emergency, writes Professor Ngaire Woods in a policy briefing commissioned by the European Parliament. In many developing countries, what is being crushed and reversed is hard-won progress towards reducing poverty, hunger, and child mortality, and towards increasing primary education, gender parity, access to safe water and sanitation – in short, progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. In this policy briefing, Woods evaluates the responses to the crisis by the IMF, World Bank, G20, and the European Union, and provides a series of recommendations for strengthening the international financial and aid architecture so that it can better respond to the urgent needs of developing countries in deep crisis.
