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Indebting the green transition: critical notes on green bonds in the South

By Tomaso Ferrando, Gabriela de Oliveira Junqueira, Iagê Miola, Flavio Marques Prol, Diogo R. Coutinho

For years, ‘green’ and ‘climate’ investments were considered a high-risk and ‘niche’ territory for environmentalists and socially oriented enterprises. However, between 2010 and 2019, more than EUR 2.28 trillion of private and public capital went into building new renewable capacity globally, primarily solar and wind energy. This reveals a new appetite for financing projects that are supposed to favor climate change mitigation and – although in a smaller percentage – climate change adaptation. With the combination of the climate emergency, the covid-19 pandemic and the global recession, the idea of ‘privately financing green growth’ has become the mainstream political, academic and business narrative. Continue reading “Indebting the green transition: critical notes on green bonds in the South”

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Development Studies and the Manufacturing of Consent

By Tara van Dijk

Why should we “think SDGs” in Development Studies?  This model of development (getting countries, corporations and other institutions to champion a list of non-binding goals and arbitrary targets) should be an object of analysis and critique. Yet this and similar messages adorn Development Studies departments’ websites, events, and curriculum.  And what do these messages preclude and promote?   They promote consent for this brand of development by precluding dissent and abstention.  Here I delve into why and how Development Studies, in effect and since its inception, manufactures consent for mainstream development thinking and projects. Continue reading “Development Studies and the Manufacturing of Consent”

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Above or below the poverty line

Three key questions for understanding shifts in global poverty

By Andy Sumner and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez

In 2010 and the following years, there was attention to the fact that much of global poverty had shifted to middle-income countries (for example here, here, and here). The world’s poor hadn’t moved of course, but the countries that are home to large numbers of poor people had got better off on average and poverty hadn’t fallen as much as one might expect with economic growth in those countries moving from low-income to middle-income. There were also some big questions over the country categories themselves. One could say the world’s poor live not in the world’s poorest countries but in fast growing countries and countries with burgeoning domestic resources to address poverty albeit ‘locked’ by domestic political economy (who doesn’t want cheap petrol?) Continue reading “Above or below the poverty line”

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(Un)learning EU development policy through post-colonial lenses

By Jan Orbie

When reading the fresh manuscript of the special issue of Global Affairs on ‘Development and International Partnerships in the EU’s external relations’, with the request to write the conclusions, I was confronted with mixed feelings. The contributions written and edited by distinguished colleagues obviously show how much the field of EU development studies has advanced conceptually and empirically. Continue reading “(Un)learning EU development policy through post-colonial lenses”