Showing posts with label Development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Development. Show all posts

Friday, February 26, 2016

Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty


Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

Monday, October 19, 2015

‘The meaning of development’

Dr ‘Toyin Kolawole - Okavango Research Institute

In his seminal paper titled The Meaning of Development published in the IDS Communication Series 44 of 1969 at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) based in the University of Sussex, England, Dudley Seers (1920–1983) painstakingly constructed the scaffolding for understanding the concept of development.

In that paper, Professor Seers - who belonged to the structuralists’ school of thought - asked three pertinent questions in relation to a country’s level of development in this manner: ‘What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality?’ He then concluded that a country would be adjudged to have experienced development if all the three problems have been alleviated significantly. If one or two or all the three of these major problems are unabated, he continued, it would then be unusual to gauge the country in question as having experienced ‘development’ even in situations where per capita income has increased significantly.