Sustainable Development Goals: Are the Rich Countries Ready?

Policymakers in the OECD countries still generally look upon the SDGs as a development policy issue. The task for high-income countries, one might assume, is simply to provide greater levels of offi cial development assistance (ODA), specifically, pushing efforts closer to the target of 0.7 percent of GDP, which few countries have managed so far. The truth is, however, that the SDGs will not just require rich countries to increase development funds for others; they will need fundamental policy changes in their own countries. If the MDGs were the telescope through which rich countries viewed the developing world, the SDGs are the mirror in which they see their own policies and performance reflected. In other words, every country is now a developing country when it comes to an economic and social model which is both sustainable and socially just

spotlight europe, August 2015: Sustainable Development Goals: Are the rich countries ready?

The Millennium Development Goals have led to tangible progress in many developing countries. Once adopted, the United Nations' new global Sustainable Development Goals will additionally require industrialized countries to implement such standards beginning in 2016. But the world's first comprehensive stocktaking shows that most industrialized nations are a long way from serving as role models for sustainable development

Towards a sociology of happiness: examining social capital and subjective well-being across subgroups of society

This dissertation contributes to a Sociology of Happiness by examining the social context of subjective well-being. It follows in Emile Durkheim’s footsteps, whose study Le Suicide initially proposed that being connected is beneficial for human beings. The empirical evidence on the relationship between social capital and subjective well-being has indeed grown considerably over the last years. However, the academic literature has a major shortcoming, as studies usually assume the importance of social capital for subjective well-being to be exactly the same between individuals. Interestingly, though, sociological theory gives reasons to expect the association between the two concepts to vary between societal subgroups based on the idea that people have different roles and find themselves in different circumstances. Hence, this thesis responds to a need to examine a new level of complexity and fills a research gap by investigating how social capital is correlated in different ways with life satisfaction by gender, age, parental status, and marital status. OLS and ordered logit regression analyses are conducted in order to systematically examine slope heterogeneity, using data from the European Social Survey for the UK. It turns out that the social context of well-being varies considerably between the subgroups studied here. For example, while among childless women volunteering is positively and very strongly associated with subjective wellbeing, the relationship is slightly negative for mothers. Consequently, this dissertation adds significant value to the happiness literature by looking beyond population means when studying the relationship between certain explanatory variables and a well-being response variable. Moreover, the thesis contributes to a much-needed theory building in research on subjective well-being by resorting to sociological theories. Important implications for current policy issues around well-being arise from the study, and it paves the way for a new wave of research which goes beyond a unitary ‘happiness formula’

Global Development and Happiness: How can Data on Subjective Wellbeing Inform Development Theory and Practice?

How can the new science of happiness add value to development theory and practice? While the topic of subjective well-being (SWB, i.e. people’s self-reported life satisfaction and happiness) has recently attracted much attention in rich nations where economic growth over the past 60 years has not led to rises in average happiness, the potential of SWB in a development context remains underexploited. To illustrate one innovative way of using SWB data in such a context and outline their possibilities to the development community, this paper considers conventional development wisdom through a life satisfaction lens. The Human Development approach with its three key elements - material conditions, health and education - is reassessed by examining to what extent these factors actually matter for people’s life satisfaction in different nations. Using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression and data from the World Values Survey (WVS) for about 100,000 people from 70 nations, considerable heterogeneity can be identified regarding the importance of these three factors for the citizens’ SWB across countries. In addition, a ranking is devised on the basis of these results which combines subjective assessments of life satisfaction from the WVS and objective living conditions as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI). As a result, it becomes clear which countries are more successful in generating the goods that truly matter for people’s well-being. The findings of this paper make a case for country specific development goals and strategies that go beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. The results can therefore inform the current debate on how to revise the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) beyond 2015 and thereby advocate Customised Development Goals (CDGs). Future research should continue to provide more evidence on what are anthropological constants in the determinants of SWB and which variables are culturally relative

Brasilia or the Limits of Theory

Modernist planning theory assumed that planning, architecture, and urban design by themselves could transform society and create new forms of collective association and personal habits. Using James Holston’s The Modernist City, an Anthropological Critique of Brasilia as my starting point, I argue in this paper that Brasilia clearly exemplifies the limits of planning theory itself. Even if it provided Brasilia’s planners with a specific and explicit set of guidelines, concepts, and principles, these ended up creating a “formalistic shell for living” that did not transform the status quo but made it even more explicit. As such, Brasilia reminds us that the development of cities is mostly the consequence of personal decisions and choices that cannot be determined a priori. Therefore, planning theory can only help planners, architects, urban designers and politicians (to name a few) “create conditions that might set in motion processes” (Abu-Lughod 1993:32), but it can nonetheless never provide us with totalizing solutions that always objectify and consider people passive recipients of planning and thus fail to include the unintended, the unexpected, the subversive, the political.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120326/1/Kroll_BrasiliaOrTheLimitsOfTheory.pd

Life on basic income : Interview accounts by basic income experiment participants on the effects of the experiment

Peer reviewe

Life on basic income : Interview accounts by basic income experiment participants on the effects of the experiment

Peer reviewe

The endemic gastropod fauna of Lake Titicaca : correlation between molecular evolution and hydrographic history

Lake Titicaca, situated in the Altiplano high plateau, is the only ancient lake in South America. This 2- to 3-My-old (where My is million years) water body has had a complex history that included at least five major hydrological phases during the Pleistocene. It is generally assumed that these physical events helped shape the evolutionary history of the lake´s biota. Herein, we study an endemic species assemblage in Lake Titicaca, composed of members of the microgastropod genus Heleobia, to determine whether the lake has functioned as a reservoir of relic species or the site of local diversification, to evaluate congruence of the regional paleohydrology and the evolutionary history of this assemblage, and to assess whether the geographic distributions of endemic lineages are hierarchical. Our phylogenetic analyses indicate that the Titicaca/Altiplano Heleobia fauna (together with few extralimital taxa) forms a species flock. A molecular clock analysis suggests that the most recent common ancestor (MRCAs) of the Altiplano taxa evolved 0.53 (0.28–0.80) My ago and the MRCAs of the Altiplano taxa and their extralimital sister group 0.92 (0.46–1.52) My ago. The endemic species of Lake Titicaca are younger than the lake itself, implying primarily intralacustrine speciation. Moreover, the timing of evolutionary branching events and the ages of two precursors of Lake Titicaca, lakes Cabana and Ballivián, is congruent. Although Lake Titicaca appears to have been the principal site of speciation for the regional Heleobia fauna, the contemporary spatial patterns of endemism have been masked by immigration and/or emigration events of local riverine taxa, which we attribute to the unstable hydrographic history of the Altiplano. Thus, a hierarchical distribution of endemism is not evident, but instead there is a single genetic break between two regional clades. We also discuss our findings in relation to studies of other regional biota and suggest that salinity tolerance was the most likely limiting factor in the evolution of Altiplano species flocks

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Are we successful in turning trade-offs into synergies?

The Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provides the framework that all United Nations (UN) member states have pledged to fulfill. The achievement of this agenda crucially depends on whether humankind will be able to maximize synergies and resolve existing trade-offs between the SDGs. We provide the first analysis of future interactions for projected SDG trends until 2030 within and between goals, and we analyze how trade-offs and synergies have evolved in the recent past globally. For certain goals, we find positive developments with notable synergies in our projections, especially for SDGs 1, 3, 7, 8, and 9: Poverty alleviation and strengthening the economy, rooted in innovation, and modern infrastructure, therefore continue to be the basis upon which many of the other SDGs can be achieved. However, especially SDGs 11, 13, 14, 16, and 17 will continue to have notable trade-offs, as well as non-associations with the other goals in the future, which emphasizes the need to foster innovations and policies that can make our cities and communities more sustainable, as well as strengthen institutions and spur climate action. We show examples of a successful transformation of trade-offs into synergies that should be emulated in other areas to create a virtuous cycle of SDG progress. The alarming inability to overcome certain persistent trade-offs we have found, and indeed the deterioration for some SDGs, can seriously threaten the achievement of the Agenda 2030