A Roadmap for Integrating Human Rights Into the World Bank Group

Offers a framework for linking effective international development and poverty reduction with human rights, including empowering communities to use the World Bank Group's grievance mechanisms. Outlines accomplishments, shortfalls, and recommendations

Responsible Mining: The Key to Profitable Resource Development

Better mining corporations want to adopt “Responsible Mining”. This paper outlines the essentials of responsible mining and offers a guide to corporations who want become responsible. Eight principles are discussed: (1) Social and environmental assessment, (2) Transparency, (3) Acceptance by stakeholders, (4) Food production trumps questionable mining, (5) Compliance with international standards, (6) Corporate prequalification, (7) Insurance and performance bonds, and (8) Royalties, taxes and fees. These principles are followed by a discussion of No-Go Zones to mining: why some types of sites should be off-limits to all mining. The Annex on Compensatory Offsets suggests that, on occasion, there may be exceptions to a No-Go Zone

Responsible sourcing of critical metals

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Mineralogical Society of America via the DOI in this recordMost critical raw materials, such as the rare earth elements (REE), are starting products in long manufacturing supply chains. It is difficult for consumers, buying cars or smartphones for example, to engage with the original mines and demand environmental and social best practice. Geoscientists can become involved in responsible sourcing because geology is related to environmental impact factors such as energy requirements, resource efficiency, radioactivity and the amount of rock mined. The energy and material inputs and emissions and waste from mining and processing can be quantified using life cycle assessment (LCA). Preliminary LCA studies for REE show little over all difference between ‘hard rocks’ such as carbonatites and easily leachable ion adsorption clays, mainly because of the embodied energy in chemicals used for leaching, dissolution and separation.This work is part funded by the NERC SoS RARE project, NE/M011429/1

Road building, land use and climate change: prospects for environmental governance in the Amazon

Some coupled land–climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road building, which facilitates human access to natural resources that beget forest fragmentation. While official government road projects have received considerable attention, unofficial road building by interest groups is expanding more rapidly, especially where official roads are being paved, yielding highly fragmented forest mosaics. Effective governance of natural resources in the Amazon requires a combination of state oversight and community participation in a ‘hybrid’ model of governance. The MAP Initiative in the southwestern Amazon provides an example of an innovative hybrid approach to environmental governance. It embodies a polycentric structure that includes government agencies, NGOs, universities and communities in a planning process that links scientific data to public deliberations in order to mitigate the effects of new infrastructure and climate change

Lees and Moonshine: Remembering Richard III, 1485-1635

Published version of article deposited in accordance with Sherpa Romeo guidelines. © University of Chicago Press, 2010publication-status: AcceptedNot long after Shakespeare’s birth (1564) the last witnesses to the reign of Richard III (1483-85) would have reached the end of their lives. Richard III (c. 1592) occupies a distinctive historical moment in relation to its subject – a period after the extinction of living memory, but still within the horizon of communicative memory, the period in which stories and recollections may be transmitted across multiple generations. This essay explores how memories and “postmemories” of Richard’s reign were preserved, transmitted and transformed over the course of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. Whilst reflecting the powerful influence of emerging contexts including the Reformation and, ultimately, Shakespeare’s play, these memories remained distinct from and sometimes at odds with textual history. They survived because they offered their bearers a resource for interpreting and resisting the predicaments of the present, from the problem of tyranny to the legacies of the Reformation