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In times of a global rise of right-wing populism, multilateral cooperation is under attack and with that international agreements. Against this backdrop, it might be fruitful to have a closer look at the success factors behind multilateral cooperation and assess whether they could also work vis-à-vis populist governments, especially with regard to the Paris climate negotiations.
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Contributing to heated international debates, the new European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen promised a carbon border tax to adjust for carbon costs at the border. To be sure, border carbon adjustments entail international trade law challenges, feasibility complications as well as fairness concerns. But if carefully designed, such adjustments can contribute to strengthening the ambition of climate action both in the EU and beyond it. More generally, there should be a stronger focus on using international trade as a leverage for climate protection.
The Arctic, in media coverage, is depicted as a region prone to international conflicts, a “lawless frontier” where “a new Cold War brews” due to the region’s strategic relevance and its estimated resource riches. Recently, a supposed diplomatic spat between Denmark (which is present through Greenland) and the USA hit the news. Most often exaggerations and fears are particularly directed towards Russia’s and China’s involvement in Arctic affairs. Often, this media narrative creates a “polar orientalism”, following a term coined by Edward Said, which describes the distorting description of a region (in Said’s case: the Middle East) by using a lens that focusses on exotic elements rather than communalities. Researchers and policy-makers, on the other hand, often use the term “Global Arctic”, to emphasise the region’s global interconnectedness and emphasise the cooperation among the various stakeholders engaged in Arctic politics.…
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In September, the UN General Assembly’s High-level Dialogue on Financing for Development met to discuss how to fund the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – four years after the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was set. The world community already acknowledged the role of non-traditional funding, namely South-South cooperation and triangular cooperation in Busan in 2011. With the new ambitious 2030 Agenda, funding became ever more crucial. The UN estimates that the funding gap for achieving the SDGs amounts to 2.5 trillion USD every year. The 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda therefore called not only for increasing Official Development Assistance (ODA) but also for mobilizing other public and private resources that go beyond ODA. To build a picture of the total funds channeled for development assistance, in 2014, the OECD started developing a new international measurement framework to cover a more comprehensive range of development finance, the “Total Official Support for Sustainable Development” (TOSSD) measure. TOSSD is due to be finalized next year. Now is the time to make sure that TOSSD can fulfil its potential to provide a more complete picture of development finance from all contributors not only from the Global North but also from the Global South.…
The International Conference on Sustainable Development (ICSD), one of the side-events to the UN General Assembly Meeting that aimed not only to generate but disseminate knowledge that is needed, as an example for the importance of national and transnational knowledge cooperation in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Under the topic “Good Practices: Models, Partnerships, and Capacity Building for the SDGs” the conference brought together more than 3,000 participants from the public and private sector as well as from civil society and academia.