Policy

This year’s conference was hosted by Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz de la Sierra (UPSA) on November 14 and 15. It was attended by about 330 persons (a 64% increase compared to last year) from 13 different countries and consisted of 3 keynote lectures, a round table discussion on energy and 50 contributed research papers (see program here). The contributed papers had been selected from a pool of 110 submitted papers (a 59% increase compared to last year) and spanned a wide variety of topics related to the process of development. All the papers presented can be downloaded from the conference webpage.

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by Rachel Satterlee

Bolivia is a beautiful, mountainous country that is very culturally diverse but which also has many inequities. None are more pronounced that those in education: As of 2004, secondary school completion rates in urban areas were at 65 percent for men and 50 percent for women, whereas rural rates were extremely low at 20 percent for men and 10 percent for women (Ministerio, 2004). Lack of educational attainment disproportionately affects the indigenous poor. According to the National Institute of Statistics, two-thirds of rural dwellers (compared to only 44 percent of urbanites) identify with one of Bolivia’s 38 recognized indigenous groups—the largest of which include the Quechua, Aymará, Guaraní, Afroboliviano, Mosetén, and Chiquitano—and in rural areas 66 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. The Unidad Académica Campesina-Carmen Pampa (UAC-CP) is one institution helping to meet this challenge by offering undergraduate degrees to men and women from Bolivia’s rural areas. Read More »

By: Lykke E. Andersen, 13 November 2013

Climate change negotiations have entered peak season again with the COP 19 just starting in Warsaw. What is it that they say: 19^th time is a charm?

This year, like previous years, key questions related to climate finance have been discussed extensively in many different settings with many different experts and stakeholders all year. Last month’s PEGNet conference in Copenhagen was one such venue. As the session chair of the above titled roundtable, I fully realize the depressing repetitiveness of yet another climate finance discussion, but I still think the main points are important and original enough to share.

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Reports by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the World Bank show that communities across South America are already feeling the impact of climate change today—and that these are likely to intensify in the future. According to the IPCC, the economies of most Latin American countries depend on agriculture, which means that climatic change and extreme weather events that affect farming also pose a tangible threat to economic prosperity and developmental goals in the region. A 2012 World Bank Report even predicts that South America will be one of the regions hit hardest if temperatures rose by more than the internationally recognised 2°C target. This post will highlight five of the central ways in which South Americans are experiencing the effects of climate change:

1. Temperature: In South America, climate change has led to a variety of temperature changes. While the widely-cited 2007 IPCC report observed an overall 1°C increase in temperature across South America over the past decade, there has been significant regional variation, leading to diverse effects. For instance, Bolivia’s highlands have actually cooled by 1°C over the past five decades, while there is some evidence for rising temperatures in the lowlands. In a 2009 World Bank Report, Drs. Lykke Andersen and Dorte Verner show that the contradictory trends of average temperatures have led to uneven social and economic effects of climate change in Bolivia. They estimate that the cooling experienced in the country’s highlands has reduced income in these areas by about 2–3 percent. In the country’s wealthier lowlands, no such negative trends were observed. This means that in Bolivia changes in temperature affect the population of the comparatively poor highlands disproportionately, compared to the wealthier lowland of the country. Read More »

Despite the progress the world has made towards eliminating extreme poverty, one in five people on the planet are still unable to provide for their most basic needs. A report by the High Level Panel—a 27 member group advising the United Nations on a global development framework beyond the target date for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—on the post-2015 development addresses this unacceptable statistic by placing the eradication of poverty on the global agenda.  The question that begs answering: ‘What and whose poverty?’

Pause for a moment and picture Aisha: She is a young widow who lives in rural northern Nigeria.  She has five children, but cannot afford to send them to school. They live in a thatch-roofed wooden hut, and the closest source of potable water is 50 km away. Aisha earns an average of $2 a day. Would you describe Aisha as poor and why is this important? On the national and global scale, two reasons immediately come to mind. The adopted measure of poverty will guide who is targeted with scarce development resources and how we assess meeting national and global poverty goals. In addition, measures can be powerful drivers of change along the direction of whatever is assessed. Read More »

By Roberto Telleria

What are the determinants of wellbeing, and how can they be influenced by policies? As pointed out by experts such as John Helliwell, Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) (Helliwell, 2002), Professor Richard Easterlin of the University of Southern California (Easterlin, 2001) and Christian Grootaert of the World Bank (Grootaert, 1999), the determinants vary according to geographical location, age, gender, time, and other economic, social and psychological variables. Thus the question of what determines wellbeing is complex. The level of wellbeing of a household seems to be a question that every member of that household can answer themselves, but this answer relies on their perceptions of what constitutes a high quality of living, family life, health, education, and the environment.

In this short article the complexities involved in modeling the interactions between the variables that determine wellbeing, and those that determine policies, are presented. Two examples illustrating the interactions between health and deforestation, that in turn affect wellbeing, are discussed. Read More »

Social movements generate a lot of excitement. Many people see them as the most legitimate way of enacting change in society, as they are “from below”, from the people themselves, more ‘inclusive’ and ‘democratic’. Movements that have come around since the 1960s differ from older styles of public pressure where the voice of the poor and the oppressed was expressed through leaders in trade unions or political parties. Examples of the “New Social Movements” in contemporary Latin America include the indigenous movement EZLN (Exército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) in Mexico and the landless workers movement in Brazil, the MST (Movimento Sem Terra). But how truly democratic and inclusive these new movements are is rarely a serious research question, but a mere assumption by scholars and supporters who fall in love with the idea of movements from below.

For almost 20 years, Dr. Judy Hellman, professor of Political Science and Social Sciences at York University, Canada, has written critically about the largely uncritical worship of new social movements that seems to have swept the world. She spoke to Development Roast about her once controversial views (which are increasingly becoming common wisdom) and the past and future of research on social movements in Latin America:

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BOOK REVIEW

Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets

Mayfly Books.

By Ioulia Fenton

Let’s say you live in a fairly rich country and you are actually quite well off. You use lots of paper in your job, drive a car, heat and air-condition your house, and regularly fly for work, vacation, and to see your family in another country. You know that this causes tons of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to be released into the atmosphere, which is driving climate change, and that if everyone in the world had your kind of a lifestyle then we’d need five planets, not one, to survive. So you decide that you want to do something about it. Even though you have started to recycle, have put energy saving light bulbs in your house, bought a Prius, and always carry your water bottle and coffee thermos flask, somehow you feel that this is not enough: the Carbon Footprint Calculator still tells you that your kind of life needs more than four planets. Read More »

According to a recent study funded by the World Bank and published in Science magazine, tropical land use change was responsible for 7 to 14 percent of gross human-induced carbon emissions between 2000 and 2005. Forests are valuable storage places for large amounts of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming when it enters the earth’s atmosphere. This is because plants absorb carbon dioxide (CO₂) and transform it into energy necessary for growing in a process called photosynthesis (for details, see the May 2013 Exactly how to trees fight climate change article by Institute for Advanced Development Studies (INESAD) researcher Tracey Li). Land use changes such as clearing forests for agriculture or construction mean that forests are less able to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it. Additionally, burning trees—which, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are made up of around 50 percent carbon—to clear land releases the carbon that was previously stored in the them.

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The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to reduce by half the number of people without access to clean water by 2015 as target ten of goal number seven: ensure environmental sustainability. And—although this fact remains controversial*—this target was met three years early in March 2012. However, this is not a cause for complacency since, according to the 2012 report by the Joint Monitoring Program—the body that carries out MDGs target assessments—780 million people are still at the back of the queue for access to clean water. In the future, improving access to water for the remaining three quarters of a million people without it will need to become a bigger, more crosscutting priority because it has much more to offer than environmental sustainability. Read More »