Well-meaning Westerners want to find ways to help the less
fortunate. Today, many are not just volunteering abroad and
donating to international nonprofits but also advancing innovations
and ...launching projects that aim to be socially transformative.
However, often these activities are not efficient ways of helping
others, and too many projects cause more harm than good.
Reimagining Global Philanthropy shares the journey of a
conservative banker and a progressive professor to find a better
way forward. Kirk S. Bowman and Jon R. Wilcox explain the boom in
the global compassion industry, revealing the incentives that
produce inefficient practices and poor outcomes. Instead of
supporting start-up projects with long-shot hopes for success, they
argue, we can dramatically improve results by empowering local
leaders. Applying lessons from the success of community banks,
Bowman and Wilcox develop and implement a new model that
significantly raises philanthropic efficacy. Their straightforward
and rigorously tested approach calls for community members to take
the lead while outside partners play a supporting role. Bowman and
Wilcox recount how they tested the model in Brazil, demonstrating
the value of giving people in marginalized communities the
opportunity to innovate. In a time of widespread social reckoning,
this book shows how global philanthropy can confront its blind
spots and failures in order to achieve truly transformative
outcomes. Readers can access five of the documentary films
discussed in the book on a companion website. In addition to the
films, chapter discussion questions and other supplemental
materials are also available at the site.
•Increased agricultural investments alone will not achieve SDG2 in Africa; complementary non-ag investments will be needed.•Climate change could lead to 16 million more people at risk of hunger ...compared to a scenario without climate change.•Investment in agriculture can more than compensate for the negative effects of climate change.•Enhanced agricultural R&D can reduce the prevalence of hunger by 55 million people in Africa.•Multi-model ensemble used to more holistically assess cost and benefits of increased agricultural investments in Africa.
We use IFPRI’s IMPACT framework of linked biophysical and structural economic models to examine developments in global agricultural production systems, climate change, and food security. Building on related work on how increased investment in agricultural research, resource management, and infrastructure can address the challenges of meeting future food demand, we explore the costs and implications of these investments for reducing hunger in Africa by 2030. This analysis is coupled with a new investment estimation model, based on the perpetual inventory methodology (PIM), which allows for a better assessment of the costs of achieving projected agricultural improvements. We find that climate change will continue to slow projected reductions in hunger in the coming decades—increasing the number of people at risk of hunger in 2030 by 16 million in Africa compared to a scenario without climate change. Investments to increase agricultural productivity can offset the adverse impacts of climate change and help reduce the share of people at risk of hunger in 2030 to five percent or less in Northern, Western, and Southern Africa, but the share is projected to remain at ten percent or more in Eastern and Central Africa. Investments in Africa to achieve these results are estimated to cost about 15 billion USD per year between 2015 and 2030, as part of a larger package of investments costing around 52 billion USD in developing countries.
The purpose of this evaluation is
threefold. First, it seeks to assess how, and how well, the
World Bank Group has supported its public and private sector
clients in their efforts to achieve greater ...environmental
sustainability over the past 15 years. Second, it attempts
to identify the principal external and internal constraints
on Bank Group effectiveness. And third, it seeks to suggest
how some of these constraints, particularly the internal
ones, can be reduced.
There is growing dissatisfaction with the economic policies advocated by the IMF and other international financial institutions - policies that have often resulted in stagnating growth, crises, and ...recessions for client countries. This book presents an alternative to "Washington Consensus" neo-liberal economic policies by showing that both macro-economic and liberalization policy must be sensitive to the particular circumstances of developing countries. One-size-fits-all policy prescriptions are likely to fail given the vast differences between countries. This book discusses how alternative approaches to economic policy can better serve developing countries both in ordinary times and in times of crisis. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199288143/toc.html
•International aid donors have both formal and informal interests.•Aid donors have economic, political, and strategic interests in the countries they fund.•Development aid serves to advance donors’ ...informal self-interests.•The interests may vary from donor to donor.
Whether aid serves the development needs of a recipient country rather than the interests of donors has been a topic of much debate and research in the field of development studies. Donor agencies have interests, as does any political actor, and bureaucratic politics theory states that any bureaucracy has a dual interest, consisting of delivering on its formal mandate as well as informally increasing its power by maximizing budgets, staff, and fields for political responsibility. This study aims to conceptualize the formal and informal interests of bilateral foreign donor bureaucracies in allocating aid, using Bangladesh forest development aid by USAID, GIZ, and the EU as a case study. Quantitative analysis of documents on actual spending in the context of forest development projects and qualitative analysis from detailed interviews with development aid experts are employed. Important informal interests of donor agencies were observed as follows: (1) drawing on consultants as well as products and services from the donor’s country; (2) expanding favorable markets for the donor’s economy; (3) increasing the donor’s geopolitical as well as policy influence in recipient countries; (4) obtaining information that is independent from the recipient government; and (5) shaping good governance as a prerequisite for investment from donor countries. Of the three donor organizations, USAID was found to have allocated extensive aid to two activities—consultancy, and collaboration and networking—that advance USAID’s informal economic and political interests. GIZ allocated major aid to recipient developmental interventions; it also advanced its informal economic and political interests (albeit to a smaller extent). The EU allocated the largest amount of aid to developmental interventions, though its informal economic and political interests were also served, even if only to a limited extent. This study concludes with key points regarding informal interests of donor bureaucracies as well as on future research fields.
When international agreements fail to solve global problems like climate change, transnational networks attempt to address them by applying global best practices, like Integrated Watershed ...Management, locally around the world. Grassroots Global Governance uses nodal governance theory to explain why some efforts succeed and others fail, but also why the process of implementing global ideas locally causes them to evolve. Transnational actors’ success in implementing global ideas depends on the strategies they use to activate networks of grassroots actors influential in local social and policy arenas. Yet, grassroots actors neither accept nor reject global ideas as presented by outsiders. Instead, they negotiate how to adapt them to fit local conditions. This contestation produces experimentation with unique institutional applications of a global idea infused with local norms and practices. Local experiments that endure are perceived as successful, allowing those involved to activate transnational networks to scale up and diffuse innovative local governance models globally. These models carry local norms and practices to the international level where they challenge existing global approaches. By guiding the way global ideas evolve through local experimentation, grassroots actors reshape international actors’ discourse, organizing, and the strategies they pursue globally. This makes them grassroots global governors. To demonstrate this, the book compares transnational efforts to implement local Integrated Watershed Management programs across Ecuador and shows how local experiments altered the global debate over how to conceptualize and implement sustainable development. In doing so, the book reveals the grassroots level as a terrain where global governance is constructed.
This paper aims to analyze the impacts of emission taxes, investments in the energy sector, expenditure on research and development, technological innovation, and tertiary sector development on the ...Chinese provincial carbon dioxide emission figures between 1995 and 2019. The econometric analysis involved the application of the latest methods which can simultaneously account for cross-sectional dependency, slope heterogeneity, and structural break issues in the data. The overall findings revealed that provincial growth and tertiary sector development were responsible for the aggravation of the carbon dioxide emission trends in China. In contrast, higher energy investments, technological innovation, renewable energy use, expenditure on research and development, and carbon emission taxes are found to abate carbon dioxide emissions and, therefore, facilitate the carbon-abatement agenda of China. Besides, the findings also revealed emission taxes, investment in research and development, technological innovation, and renewable energy use jointly reduce carbon dioxide emissions further. In line with these abovementioned findings, several policy-level recommendations are put forward.
•The macroeconomic determinants of China's carbon-neutrality target are examined.•Energy investment, technological innovation, and renewable energy reduce CO2.•R&D expenditure and emission taxes reduce CO2.•Provincial growth and tertiary sector development boost CO2.•R&D expenditure, Renewable energy and technological innovation jointly reduce CO2.
•Using an RCT, we assess the impacts of agriculture, nutrition, and gender interventions on women’s empowerment in Bangladesh.•Single or bundled trainings on agriculture, nutrition, and gender were ...provided to husbands and wives jointly.•All interventions improved women’s empowerment without disempowering men.•Nutrition trainings improved men’s gender attitudes, particularly on women’s responsibilities around cooking and childcare.•The role of engaging men and women jointly in interventions is a promising area for future research.
The importance of women’s roles for nutrition-sensitive agricultural projects is increasingly recognized, yet little is known about whether such projects improve women’s empowerment and gender equality. We study the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) pilot project, which was implemented as a cluster-randomized controlled trial by the Government of Bangladesh. The project’s treatment arms included agricultural training, nutrition behavior change communication (BCC), and gender sensitization trainings delivered to husbands and wives together – with these components combined additively, such that the impact of gender sensitization could be distinguished from that of agriculture and nutrition trainings. Empowerment was measured using the internationally-validated project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), and attitudes regarding gender roles were elicited from both men and women, to explore potentially gender-transformative impacts. Our study finds that ANGeL increased both women’s and men’s empowerment, raised the prevalence of households achieving gender parity, and led to small improvements in the gender attitudes of both women and men. We find significant increases in women’s empowerment scores and empowerment status from all treatment arms but with no significant differences across these. We find no evidence of unintended impacts on workloads and inconclusive evidence around impacts on intimate partner violence. Our results also suggest some potential benefits of bundling nutrition and gender components with an agricultural development intervention; however, many of these benefits seem to be driven by bundling nutrition with agriculture. While we cannot assess the extent to which including men and women within the same treatment arms contributed to our results, it is plausible that the positive impacts of all treatment arms on women’s empowerment outcomes may have arisen from implementation modalities that provided information to both husbands and wives when they were together. The role of engaging men and women jointly in interventions is a promising area for future research.
Due to the urbanization and economic growth, planning of regional sustainable development has become one of the major challenges in the world. The key indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP), ...electricity and energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission (GHG) are considered in sustainable development planning. This paper determines number of required workforce in different sectors of each province in Iran considering targets/goals for sustainable development indicators in the 2030 macroeconomic and regional planning. First, the relative goals are designed for GDP, electricity, energy and GHG emission and then, two weighted goal programming models are applied to allocate the optimal workforce among four sectors: agriculture, industry, services and transportation. The first model minimizes recruitment of new workforce and allows current workforce exchange among the four sectors in each province in order to achieve the goals, while the second model indicates equitable distribution of new workforce recruitment in different sectors within each province. In both models, the workforce changes have been investigated based on achieving the desirable growth rates of GDP, GHG, electricity and energy consumption as planned by the government. Based on the results of this paper, policy makers can manage workforce and the government can make optimized decisions to macroeconomic and regional planning.
•Most developing countries manage W&S at the subnational level, yet global monitoring rarely considers local governance.•This review identifies potential barriers to implementation of SDG 6 with a ...focus on local governance.•This review also analyzes contradictions within SDG 6 as well as across other SDGs.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is ambitious and inclusive, but how well are these global aspirations likely to result in implementable policy change for water and sanitation? This article assesses governance challenges at the local level associated with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which pledges to ensure sustainable water and sanitation for all. The majority of developing countries manage services at the subnational level, making the quality of local governance the key ingredient for improvements in the sector. This article first reviews prior shortcomings in global monitoring efforts and how SDG 6 was formulated to address them. The analysis then examines local governance challenges facing SDG 6 and potential barriers to implementation. These barriers manifest as both contradictions within SDG 6 itself as well as contradictions between SDG 6 and the Sustainable Development Agenda more broadly. As SDG monitoring rubrics undergo further reformulations, it may be necessary to prioritize between goals and targets, or otherwise stagger the timing of their promotion and implementation.
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