Global Policy最新文献

Once imagined as a theoretical possibility, global citizen deliberation is now beginning to appear in the practice of governance. How should global citizens' forums be constituted? A largely unexamined consensus on random selection as the ideal method to locate citizen participants has fractured as its limitations become more apparent. We undertake a systematic comparative examination of random selection and its alternatives, emphasizing, respectively, demographic diversity, discursive diversity, developmental participation, and affectedness. These alternatives are evaluated in terms of how well they promote inclusive and high-quality deliberation within the forum; how well they facilitate broader functions such as recommending policy decisions, providing information to policy makers on the distribution of informed global opinion, enhancing macro-level deliberation, and strengthening global discourses and publics; and how well they secure the perceived legitimacy of a forum. We show how different sorts of recruitment and representation might be combined to good effect, in the context of a proposal for a global citizens' assembly on genome editing.

A global consensus now recognises biodiversity as equal to climate change in its importance to sustainable development. While multilateral development banks (MDBs) have developed a strong emphasis on climate change, how do they approach biodiversity as a new priority? Current literature on MDBs' approach to climate change is prolific, but scholarship on biodiversity is scarce. Here, we compare MDBs' climate and biodiversity efforts in order to identify differences, analyze causes, and ultimately propose ways for MDBs to prioritise biodiversity. Methodologically, we analyze MDB documents in the form of policies, high-level announcements, and strategies, in order to compare climate change and biodiversity across five aspects: Financing, policy, strategy, client requirements, and environmental reporting. Subsequently, we apply automated text analysis to examine mentions of climate change and biodiversity in annual reports. Focusing on the 10 largest MDBs, we find that across all five aspects, MDBs' prioritisation of biodiversity lags far behind that of climate change. From that, we recommend that biodiversity be prioritised by MDBs in three ways: By adopting an integrated strategic approach to environmental issues that goes beyond climate, by not only addressing biodiversity through safeguards but also through labeled projects, and by assigning targets as proportions of total financing.

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) are transnational governance instruments that can be leveraged to pursue sustainable development in global value chains. They have proliferated since the 1990s in terms of their number and the share of global production they govern. This paper shares some key insights arising from the considerable body of literature that has analysed the role of these instruments for sustainable production and trade. First, it introduces VSS, traces the evolution of their adoption and takes stock of the research on their sustainability impacts. Next, some major developments in the VSS realm are discussed, related to public policy and the emergence of national sustainability standards. The paper then zooms in on the challenges and limitations of VSS in transforming value chains towards sustainability, focusing on the shortcomings related to inclusiveness and the problems arising from their proliferation. The paper concludes by distilling recommendations on overcoming these challenges, especially in light of recent policy developments, and outlines what different stakeholders can do to make VSS more effective and inclusive instruments for sustainable value chains.

Local governments engage in combating global warming by cooperating in transnational city networks. These networks are often hailed as an alternative to the alleged gridlock of interstate cooperation. Still, it remains unclear if and how the institutional characteristics of city networks can overcome this gridlock. Therefore, we analyze to what extent cooperation in city networks faces the same institutional challenges as those related to interstate collaboration. Our research focuses on six climate networks and draws on 33 in-depth interviews, which are analyzed through qualitative directed content analysis. Three findings stand out. First, networks struggle with growing multipolarity, as they lack the capacity to engage with all members. While adopting a strongly regionalized approach, the necessary centralization to efficiently coordinate regional suboffices seems lacking. Second, targets tend to be regarded as a general direction rather than proper objectives that must be implemented within a specific time frame. Third, city officials have a less clear overview of the landscape of networks than network employees. At the same time, they indicate that the proliferation of networks complicates the internal organization of networking activities. Taken together, we conclude that climate city networks do not necessarily allow structurally avoiding the causes of interstate gridlock.

Drawing upon research across multiple countries, the papers in this special issue explore how public authority dynamics affect development and humanitarian practices and processes. Some focus on places commonly labelled as in crisis or understood to be subject to multiple overlapping crises, where responses to epidemics, persistent conflict and migrations are in progress. Others examine how public authority dynamics affect the everyday governance of development in outwardly more stable contexts. The seven empirical papers are complimented by a conceptual framework for analysing how power permeates the foundations of public authority dynamics. Viewed together, they illuminate why exclusions, coercion and violence are often used by those claiming the legitimacy to govern, and how grasping what this may mean for well-intended interventions or reform efforts remains a challenge for practitioners. However, they also point towards a pressing need for outsiders to recognise their own roles in constructing and legitimising, sometimes harmful, forms of public authority in the places they work. And they suggest the first step is to confront a reluctance to acknowledge public authority dynamics in their official depictions of programmes' progress, learnings and impacts.

Latin America and the Caribbean is becoming the next region of strategic importance in an era of great power competition, and no other country is more pivotal to the balance of power there than Colombia. Chinese influence in Latin America and the Caribbean has increased tremendously in the last decade through the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative, trade volumes, and diplomatic pressures on Latin American and Caribbean countries, both for them to recognize Beijing's government and to remain quiet in international fora about Beijing's human rights violations. Field work conducted in Colombia complemented by consultation of qualitative and quantitative secondary sources revealed that Colombia has been an exception, receiving less Chinese attention and investment compared to other countries in the region. Colombia's special relationship with the United States, its own reluctance to turn towards China, and China's decision to prioritize other nations in the region emerge as reasons for why Colombia is an exceptional case. And yet, looking ahead, this reality is likely to change. The United States must act deliberately and decisively now to strengthen its special relationship with Colombia and thus maintain its strategic standing in Latin America for the coming decades.

This article proposes a preliminary conceptual framework that integrates digitality, or the condition of being digital, with existing frameworks of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction. It builds on existing literature about how the Internet impacts social capital, polarization, participation, and conflict as well as traditional conflict research that examines stability post-conflict. The framework is designed to evaluate the impact of digitality, which I treat as the independent variable, on six societal factors relevant to post-conflict civil society, which I treat as dependent variables. I hypothesize that these effects are meaningful for outcomes of social capital, reintegration, and justice in post-conflict civil society and find that digitality meaningfully changes post-conflict civil society. Finally, I recommend that policymakers tailor a peacebuilding approach to a digital world.

The implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement has produced one of the most comprehensive and exhaustive peacebuilding efforts to date. The ambitious peace agreement, centred around six core themes, has expanded the scope of peacebuilding into areas that traditionally have been largely ignored or overlooked by policymakers. While the implementation process is still maintaining an overall trajectory that can be considered as success, the same process is still poised with a range of engdogenous and exogenous challenges that may undermine both the pace and the quality of peacebuilding efforts. This article surveys the current trends in the implementation phase, highlighting the key dynamics that stand in the way of an effective and timely implementation of the Colombian peace plan. In addition to exploring the emerging challenges to the liberal peacebuilding approach, this article also highlights the significance of concurrent opportunities and liabilities that stem from developmental approaches to peacebuilding.

The multiple crises of Colombian-Venezuelan borderland geopolitics, which include a rise in Venezuelan refugees entering Colombia, mounting armed conflict from illegal armed groups throughout Colombia and the mixed efficacy of policy responses by the government, are converging to drive an evolution in Colombia's security concerns. This convergence of crises rivals the security conditions of the early 2000's. As before, the government faces prolific armed conflict, loss of legitimacy over sovereign territory to a host of illegal armed groups, unchecked coca cultivation-trafficking and illicit economies, and an overwhelming loss of confidence in the central government's abilities to govern and counter these threats. This paper argues that the cumulative effect of the nascent convergence of crises is the subsequent rise of mounting Colombian insecurity and threats to stability that now permeates throughout the country – spanning and linking rural, urban and borderland areas in unprecedented ways while driving Venezuelan xenophobia and social unrest.