Securing Greater Social Accountability in Natural Resource Management

The world is experiencing a historic convergence of increasing demand for natural resources from emerging economies, prices at record levels across various commodity groups, a downward trend in resource supply, serious trends of ecological instability, and the rise of inequality between those who develop and profit from such resources and the communities that host them. As the world convenes in 2012 for the Rio+20 Earth Summit and marks 50 years since the passage of the UN Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, natural resources are once again changing the geopolitical landscape of countries around the world. Three and a half billion people?half of the global population?live in 56 resource-rich and resource-dependent developing countries, representing less than one third of the 193 members of the UN. (?)Securing Greater Social Accountability in Natural Resource Management

Introducing a new technology to enhance community sustainability: An investigation of the possibilities of sun spots

The introduction of the Sun SPOT, Small Programmable Object Technology, developed by Sun Microsystems has been depicted as providing a revolutionary change in cyber physical interaction. Based on Sun Java Micro Edition (ME), this sensor technology has the potential to be used across a number of discipline areas to interface with systems, the environment and biological domains. This paper will outline the potential of Sun SPOTs to enhance community sustainability. An action based research project was carried out to investigate the potential uses of these technologies and develop a prototype system as a proof of concept. The research will compare Sun SPOTs with similar technologies, provide an assessment of the technology, and propose a number of possible implementations of the technology to enhance community sustainability

Maximizing co-benefits: Exploring opportunities to strengthen equality and poverty reduction through adaptation to climate change

Meeting the global commitment to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels will require collective, complementary and simultaneous action by nation states and multinational entities. This crisis, however, is additional to existing development challenges and is symptomatic of a fractured development model that has tended to emphasise the quantitative over the qualitative. The climate crisis comes amid a global economic crisis and the reverberating impacts of the preceding fuel and food crises. Multiple crises have arisen from the successive and collective failures to connect the economic, social and environmental dimensions of development appropriately, and to address systemic vulnerabilities arising from income inequality and volatility, lack of opportunities, unequal distribution of and access to resources, and a high dependence by the poor and vulnerable on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture. Thus the climate “crisis” presents a unique opportunity and added urgency to achieving the ideals expressed in Agenda 21 and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) relating to sustainable and equitable development. Analysis of the implicit and explicit challenges in addressing the multidimensionality of development finds much potential in the “co-benefits approach” to advancing efforts to mainstream climate change into development. This has been found to facilitate innovative approaches and to foster a focus on sustainable and progressively equitable development, suggesting that equality, growth and sustainability can be compatible. In this regard, issues of the “how” become as important as the “what” in development. At its core, the debate centres on issues of governance, manifested in both the context of social exclusion as well as the hierarchies between ideologies of thought and between sectors. The implications extend beyond a response to climate change but go the heart of development as a whole. The underlying ideal of the Millennium Declaration (UN, 2000) is that growth should be balanced and influenced by poverty reduction, equality and environmentally sustainable imperatives. How countries fuel growth (and not just in structural and mechanical terms) determines who will have access to resources, how they will be used in a macro sense, and the sustainability of such actions. This paper is largely exploratory, seeking to identify options and structures rather than define solutions, and it focuses largely on adaptation in the context of national climate-change strategies

Compartilhamento de Benefícios: Combinando Mudanças Climáticas e Desenvolvimento nos Esforços da Política Nacional

O recém-lançado Rural Poverty Report 2011 (IFAD, 2010) demonstra que cerca de 1,4 bilhão de pessoas continua a viver em extrema pobreza, lutando para sobreviver com menos de USD 1,25 por dia, e que mais de dois terços vivem nas áreas rurais dos países em desenvolvimento. A variabilidade e as mudanças climáticas tendem a piorar a situação destas pessoas, exacerbando ainda mais a desigualdade de gênero?isto é indiscutível. O dilema da política continua sendo ?como? conciliar as complexidades e as múltiplas dimensões desta ?problemática?. (?)Compartilhamento de Benefícios: Combinando Mudanças Climáticas e Desenvolvimento nos Esforços da Política Nacional

China and the world: South-south cooperation for inclusive, green growth

[Sustainable development in a multi-polar world] World leaders convened for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June 2012, marking 20 years since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and at a time of rapidly increasing pressures on the planet's ecosystems and impacts on the poor and vulnerable members of society. Rio+20 focused on two closely related solutions to the world's challenges - new institutional frameworks for sustainable development, and the drive to a green economy defined as an economy 'that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities' (UNEP, 2012). (...

Social policy in the post-crisis context of small island developing states: A synthesis

[Introduction] This paper provides a synthesis of the multifaceted impact of the global economic crisis on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), focusing on the Pacific and Caribbean regions. It shows that the social investment agenda, which has underpinned so much of the development progress of SIDS, has been particularly challenged by the global economic crisis and will require innovations and policy changes by SIDS in order to sustain and advance beyond current achievements. Global action will be required to enhance the available fiscal space for these actions. Additionally, in the SIDS, particular attention needs to be paid to the design and implementation of social policies that reduce vulnerability, improve resilience to exogenous shocks, and thus lower the human and productivity costs of exposure to repeated shocks. These include high unemployment and underemployment, rising crime and persistent inequalities across income groups and between rural and urban communities. The transitive effects of such exogenous shocks on the incomes, food security and access to basic public goods of poor and vulnerable households demonstrate the need for a new policy approach, one that is better placed than current approaches to increase SIDS’ resilience to future shocks. The synthesis, based largely on experiences of and lessons learned from five countries in the Pacific and five in the Caribbean, seeks to advocate a ‘paradigm shift’ in global and national-level approaches to the development challenges facing SIDS

Mitigation of what and by what? Adaptation by whom and for whom? Dilemmas in delivering for the poor and the vulnerable in international climate policy

[Introduction] Despite notable advances in the “climate change-development” discourse and the rapid evolution of the climate-finance architecture, many of the fundamentally politicised issues that shape the existing dilemma on how to confront global climate change have been avoided or delayed. A largely market-driven response has not advanced an accountability-driven, long-term agenda, and competing interests continue to shape the discourse on adaptation and mitigation - thus influencing whose risk becomes predominant and whose impacts and losses are prioritised within and between states. This is not defined only by actions in themselves, but also by the structural reality within which policy is being shaped. In the current structure, those with the capacity to develop new technologies will have a customer base formed by those who are likely to be most vulnerable to climate change. Moreover, the extent to which we change (or can change) current patterns of consumption and production will be a reflection of the technologies available to make that change, the willingness to do so, and the level to which both adaptation and mitigation finance and projects prioritise and advance social-equity approaches, including norms for ensuring access to technology. The “energy poor” and the disenfranchised do not automatically benefit from large-scale technology-transfer projects, and some interventions help country efforts while having little impact at the community level. This raises a number of fundamental policy concerns, including the achievement of a reasonable balance within both the intent and implementation of policy, and between the imperatives of managing the climate crisis and securing development progress. Fundamentally, in the context of climate change, can we avoid what the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, 2006: 4) has referred to as often being “development as usual, with a brief embarrassed genuflection towards [in other words, paying lip-service to] the desirability of sustainability”? Using an analytical framework that combines theories of politics, “public goods”, collective action, political economy and international relations, this paper assesses current efforts and the evolving discourse on equity, with a view to reaching a better understanding of what it would take to achieve some balance between averting the worst of climate change and manage its impacts while safeguarding and enabling further progress on development. By focusing on a reasonable equity of outcomes (quality) rather than the sum of actions (quantity), the paper finds that the language used in the discourse reinforces its innately political framing, as well as prevailing governance arrangements. They in turn have led to an application of “development” that has limited the inclusion of some dimensions, namely the social, relative to others, in some cases resulting in limited direct benefits for the poor and vulnerable, missed opportunities, and a number of social risks that could undermine other development efforts. The “reinforcing role” of global policy frameworks in creating the necessary enabling environment for collective, multinational action is also given specific attention

Development from below: Social accountability in natural resource management

[Introduction] We live in a time of transformational change, with society, economy, ecology and politics in a state of flux the world over. Of particular focus in this Working Paper are the implications for mineral-dependent economies of living in an increasingly resource-constrained world. Both countries for which growth depends on the extraction, refinement and export of such minerals, and those whose growth depends indirectly on the use of minerals in other resource-dependent industrial processes are considered. Attention is also placed on countries newly emerging as mineral-rich economies and for whom mineral exploitation will begin to play an increasing role in the structure and scale of growth. In the broader policy context, our focus is on the transition to a model of natural resource governance where goals of inclusion and sustainability are no longer secondary considerations but rather central ones. (...