Tous les articles et traductions

Buying Congress in 2012
My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a (...)

Edited by Frédéric Bazin, Jamie Skinner, Jérôme Koundouno, IIED Publications, 128 pages, download the pdf version on the website
Over 150 large dams have been built in West Africa over the last 50 years. Many more are in the planning stages to meet the region’s demands for energy, water and food (...)

Science and technology can seem remote from the unfolding dramas of the world but they were never far from the front line in the first months of the Arab Spring.
When revolution broke out in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in January, scientists were there in force, helping to plant the seeds of change. (...)

In the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion, Iraq has struggled to rebuild infrastructure critical to providing citizens basic tools for economic, political, and social justice and prosperity.
Among the government’s main initiatives is increasing access to the internet and other channels of (...)

The Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission heralds an expansion of dialogue about human rights abuses in member states. Could a Muslim human rights commission also revitalize the image of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation?
In June 2011, 57 foreign ministers met in Kazakhstan to (...)

As the Arab Spring unfolded throughout 2011, and as Spain’s indignados and the now worldwide ‘Occupy’ movement gained momentum, important social movements also rose up across Central and South America.
In 2011, Latin Americans took to the streets in big cities and small towns to defend their (...)

Hundreds of activists and academics from around the world gathered at the International Seminar “Planet Earth: Anti-Systemic Movements” to discuss the importance of the 1994 Zapatista uprising on its 18th anniversary. In the context of the popular insurrections that have emerged this year across (...)

Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities against REDD and for Life.
Indigenous leaders returning from Durban, South Africa condemn the fiasco of the United Nations climate change talks and demand a moratorium on a forest carbon offset scheme called REDD+ which they say (...)

The La Mata and La Ventosa wind park in the state of Oaxaca is the World Bank’s flagship Clean Technology Fund (CTF) project in Mexico. The UK government has provided £385 million in capital to the CTF from its overseas aid budget, 14% of the CTF’s total funding.
This study shows that:
The wind (...)

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.
But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me (...)

A growing number of US citizens raise their voices “demanding a new social contract” as the multiple world crises are increasing “poverty and income inequality at historic levels.” This unprecedented movement nurtures hope in a change of policies and behaviors “geared toward the well-being of (...)

Civil society organizations that participated in the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held this week in Busan, South Korea, regretted that the deal reached at the conference was not binding for all the donor countries, and the lack of a rights based approach, especially on gender, and of (...)

A summit of huge importance was held in Venezuela on December 2-3, 2011. Two hundred years after Latin America’s independence fighters first raised the battle cry for a united Latin America, 33 heads of state from across the region came together to form the Community of Latin American and (...)

The annual report of the International Institute for Labour Studies projects a grim future for employment prospects.
With the United States and much of Europe grappling with the slowdown in their economies and the resultant social unrest, the publication of the World of Work Report 2011: (...)

An independent study says some 250 thermal power projects that have got clearances may be meant just to grab land and water resources.
THERE have been a growing number of headlines that speak of an energy crisis and the energy deficit in India in the last few years. The disparities in the (...)

From Tunisia to Egypt, Islamists are gaining the popular vote. Far from threatening stability, this makes it a real possibility.
Ennahda, the Islamic party in Tunisia, won 41 per cent of the seats of the Tunisian constitutional assembly last month, causing consternation in the West. But (...)

By Susana Baria and Purnima Ramanujan, A Report for Focus on the Global South, March 2011, dowload online
Using case studies from the manufacturing sector in India this paper aims to provide an understanding of the theoretical framework proposed by feminist economists on the process of (...)

People from 16 villages on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border have been demonstrating their resistance to the Par-Tapi-Narmada river interlinking project, another multi-dam project which is slated to submerge 3,572 hectares of forests and displace 25,000 people.
[...] The project is part of the (...)

The first post in this two-post series featured highlights from a discussion between bloggers in Cuba, the United States (US), and Spain focusing on the use of new media in Cuba, where Internet access and technological tools are extremely scarce.
For this post, I interviewed City University of (...)

In the face of the world’s urgent economic and environmental problems, political leadership is failing. But from the ground up, new tools of understanding are emerging to fill the gap and point a way forward.
The world’s financial crisis is deepening, and protests are spreading across the world (...)