Global Policy最新文献

The New Development Bank (NDB) was established in 2015 by the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (referred to as the BRICS). The establishment of the NDB was one of the outcomes of the economic and political dissatisfaction arising out of the growing disparity between the BRICS' development needs, their share of the world economy, and their representation in the established institutions of the global financial architecture. The paper examines the origins of NDB, the unique aspects of its governance structure, innovations in its operational model, and the challenges it currently faces. The paper concludes that 9 years after its establishment, NDB has completed the core foundational work required of a new multilateral development bank. It is undoubtedly an interesting experiment in the creation of a new international financial institution, and it has made a good and solid start. However, the current global environment is very different from the world of 9 years ago. If the NDB can navigate well the current challenges and if it can scale up significantly, then the NDB indeed has the potential to make a significant impact on the global architecture of development finance. Whether it does so, remains to be seen.

This article examines Bangladesh's new membership in the BRICS-led New Development Bank (NDB), as the Bangladesh country study for the Special Section on ‘The Evolution of New Development Bank: A Decade Plus in the Making’, in Global Policy journal. In September 2021, Bangladesh became the first country outside of the original BRICS founding members to join NDB. The analysis details how Bangladesh went about joining NDB, especially the geopolitics and diplomacy between Bangladesh and the key NDB founding members (India, China, Russia) which supported Bangladesh's entry; why Bangladesh joined NDB, the main motivations or interests; and how NDB membership is turning out for Bangladesh after acceding to the Bank, what are Bangladesh and the Bank actually doing together, are they realizing the main opportunities as intended, or are outcomes not as intended. Throughout the analysis, we assess how Bangladesh's membership in NDB compares to its multi-decade memberships in the World Bank, Asian Development Bank (ADB), Islamic Development, and its newer relations with the other new China-supported multilateral bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). This study combines primary data gathered from field research, primary desk research, and cross-verification with the related data, and secondary sources.

Global politics has shown increasing interest in cities, particularly in the field of climate policy and governance. Yet, we still have little understanding of which cities engage the most in global urban climate governance. Answering this question is a first step towards understanding who decides for whom in a system that has decisive influence on wider global policy processes. In this article, we seek to identify and analyse the characteristics and position of cities in global urban climate governance to reassess its composition. To do so, we conduct a social network analysis of 15 transnational city networks. Results emphasise that global and large cities are the most central, but small and middle-size cities are the most numerous actors of the system. Global South cities are larger than their Northern counterparts in the system. Those less central and understudied actors likely have less influence over which norms are shared, yet they should not be seen as followers or imitators of climate policy. It is important to pay more attention to them to understand their multifaceted role in cities' collective efforts to address climate change.

This paper provides an expanded analysis of NATO security burden sharing by including a variety of conglomerate security terms that involve subsets of military expenditure (ME), UN and non-UN peacekeeping contributions, global health spending, UN environmental support, and official development assistance. In so doing, we identify components of security spending that promote or inhibit free riding on allies' security spillovers. Additionally, we examine security burden sharing when the NATO alliance is conceptually augmented to include three key Asia-Pacific allies – Australia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea. The paper's statistical tests for security burden sharing rely on spatial-lag panel models that account for ally connectiveness based on alliance membership, contiguity and US power projection, and allies’ relative locations. Security subsets containing ME display robust free riding or reliance on other allies’ security spillovers, while security subsets not containing ME indicate allies responding positively to security spillovers.

In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to exit the European Union, which was surrounded by political and social uncertainty. The United Kingdom now negotiates its own trade agreements, and in March 2023, it agreed to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (CPTPP). A health impact assessment (HIA) was undertaken in 2022–23 to predict the potential impact of the CPTPP on the health and well-being of the Welsh Population. This paper explores the HIA findings and highlights the value of the approach in engaging with stakeholders and informing policymakers. This HIA followed a standard five-step approach which involved a literature review to identify potential health impacts, qualitative interviews with cross-sectoral stakeholders and the development of a community health profile. The HIA identified potential impacts across the wider determinants of health and specific vulnerable population groups. Investor state dispute settlement mechanisms, economic uncertainty and loss of regulatory policy space were identified as key pathways for health impacts. The findings have been beneficial in informing decision-makers to prepare for the CPTPP in Wales using an evidence-informed approach. This work has demonstrated the value of a HIA approach that uses a transparent process to mobilise a wide range of evidence, resulting in transferrable learning.

When the Biden administration came to power, the hope was that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) (2015), the so-called Iran nuclear deal, would be restored. Due to domestic constraints and in the case of Iran also a valid alternative, both the US and the Rohani administration played hardball during the negotiations. As the Iranian nuclear program further advanced and the ties with Russia and China became stronger, the conservative Raisi administration was even less interested in reviving the nuclear deal. What remains are mini-deals that are more advantageous for Iran than for the US. Billions of dollars of Iran are (or will be) unfrozen by the US, while Iran's break-out time of its nuclear program has shrunk to zero days. Given that the overall goal of the international community (and especially the US) was to prevent Iran from building the bomb, one can only conclude that that policy has basically failed. Although Teheran has not built the bomb yet, it is now closer to the bomb than ever. Liberal theory and more in particular Putnam's two-level game help explain this outcome.

Drawing upon ‘governance diaries,’ a method which used repeated interviews with a set of households and intermediaries in three countries—Mozambique, Myanmar and Pakistan—to understand how marginalised groups meet their daily governance needs, we argue that local governance networks constitute a form of public authority. The networks we examine encompass a range of local actors (state and non-state), who help develop and enforce rules and ensure social coordination. We highlight the role of intermediaries who constitute the first point of contact for people seeking to resolve various issues. We show how these intermediaries and their networks are specific to each context, not just at a national level, but down to a granular local level. Decision-making and the exercise of power moves around within the networks, blurring formal/informal boundaries. We conclude that in these contexts of fragility, public authority is embedded in and exercised through local governance networks.

From the Summit of South American–Arab Countries (ASPA) created in 2005, UAE–South American relations have continued to develop based on a combination of pragmatism, threat perception, political support and expanding economic interests. We argue that the strength of UAE engagement in this region is consistent with its attempts to build, deploy and benefit from soft power globally through economic statecraft in a mutually reinforcing series of bilateral and multilateral relationships. These include forums such as the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the expanding BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The article draws on primary and secondary data in English, Portuguese and Spanish, focusing mainly on UAE relations with Brazil and Venezuela. We find that through a myriad of growing investment relations and first-mover advantage on arms and industrial cooperation, the UAE is well positioned vis-à-vis other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to benefit from the economic, diplomatic and security ties that could boost its relational autonomy in a competitive and uncertain regional and international environment.

During the last two decades, Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) have increased in quantity and broadened in scope. Far from merely reducing tariffs, they now set out a detailed discipline also on behind-the-border measures. Due to their trade-restrictive potential, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) are now systematically regulated in PTAs. Since PTAs discriminate by definition, it is pivotal to understand whether their regulation of TBTs may be reconciled with the multilateral non-discrimination obligation. Against this backdrop, this article aims to assess whether WTO-incompatible TBT provisions in PTAs may benefit from the GATT 1994 ‘Regional Exception’, that is, Article XXIV. I will argue that, by virtue of the lex specialis principle, Article XXIV may not shield violations of the TBT Agreement. The impact of this study is two-fold. First, it shows that Members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) must respect the Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) clause when integrating their domestic policies. Second, using TBTs as a case study, it proposes some crucial adjustments to WTO case law, that should be considered also when deciding on the interplay between the GATT 1994 and WTO Agreements other than the TBT Agreement.

When will stringent sustainability commitments (not) be a stumbling block in the negotiation of trade agreements? Although the existing literature has explored the determinants of the design of sustainability provisions in trade agreements, few works have explored when countries will accept/reject those provisions once their content cannot be changed. Based on insights from game theory, we flesh out the conditions under which there will be an equilibrium in favor of hard sustainability provisions in trade deals. We then present empirical illustrations related to Mexico's participation in the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) and Brazil's participation in the EU-Mercosur trade negotiations. Our model shows that (1) fears of partner opportunism, (2) the costs of nonparticipation in trade deals, and (3) costs of adjustments to hard trade-sustainability commitments are key to understanding whether a compromise can arise on trade and strong sustainability commitments. The model highlights what sorts of concessions ought to be made for negotiations to prosper. The findings point to how the changing structure of trade governance may affect the decision-making process of Global South countries. The paper concludes with recommendations and avenues for further research.