Comments to the Draft Working Group III Workplan

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is currently working on how to reform international investment treaties, focusing in particular on those treaties’ provisions enabling investors to sue governments in international arbitration. As an observer organization in this process, CCSI has emphasized that in the context of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform, it is important to first consider what it is that investment treaties aim to achieve, and only then to consider what form(s) of dispute settlement will best advance those objectives. This means not only looking at reform of the existing ISDS mechanism, but also alternatives to it. Having identified various concerns about ISDS and determined that such concerns merit multilateral reform, UNCITRAL is now engaged in developing procedural reform solutions. To contribute to UNCITRAL’s work, CCSI, together with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), submitted five documents outlining potential reform options and considerations: Comments to the Draft Working Group III Workplan. The draft workplan is available on the Working Group III website and is intended to set forth and allocate time and resources to the WGIII activities over the coming years. Our comments relate to making the plan of work more transparent and participatory, in particular for developing countries, non-governmental Working Group III observers (including our organizations) and also how the workplan should incorporate the “cross-cutting issues.

Formal knowledge networks : a study of Canadian experiences

French version available in IDRC Digital Library: Réseaux formels du savoir : une étude des expériences canadienne

Capacity building for integrated environmental assessment and reporting : training manual

2d ed

The post-2015 debate and the place of education in development thinking

As the end date for the Millennium Development Goals approaches so the focus on goals, visions and policies for development after 2015 becomes ever heightened. However, there has been relatively little engagement by educational research community in these debates. What then is being written about education in the key post-2015 documents? How is education's role in development conceptualised by those most central to shaping new accounts? I explore these issues through an analysis of a key text on post-2015, the High Level Panel Report of May 2013 (UN-HLP 2013), and an exploration of a year's worth of posts on 30 prominent blogs and websites discussing post-2015 matters. This leads me to two further, interlinked questions: what are the implications of potential marginalisation and irrelevance from these debates for the field of international education and development research? What are the potential dangers for the field of closer engagement in these debates and their growing use of social media? The academic international education and development community may be more comfortable in keeping these policy debates at a distance, but this may play against the strong educational research drive to engage in social science that makes a difference. If there is to be engagement with post-2015 then alternative ways of developing practices of research, action and dialogue need further strengthened. This may include interdisciplinary dialogues around such issues as early childhood development, the role of professions in development or environmental sustainability. Engagement with the post-2015 debate would also require a careful analysis of how best to engage with the instrumentalised accounts of education that are dominant in the policy-advocacy arena. This would entail more strategic positions on the uses and dangers of social media. At the same time, engagement with development studies as well as the development policy community requires a reappraisal of epistemological and methodological stances

The impact of a household biogas programme on energy use and expenditure in East Java

Biogas has been promoted as a renewable, cleaner and cheaper energy source. While there are several initiatives promoting the use of biogas, credible analyses of its effects on the use of alternative energy sources and energy related expenditure are limited. This study uses panel data from households engaged in dairy farming in rural East Java to assess the impact of a household level programme, which promotes the construction of digesters that produce biogas, on energy use and expenditures. Both a difference-in-difference analysis and a pipeline comparison show that the use of digesters leads to a sharp reduction in energy related expenditures and a reduction in the use of firewood and liquefied petroleum gas. However, without subsidies, the payback period of between 11 and 14 years, albeit based only on reductions in energy costs accruing from investing in a digester, is perhaps too long to justify the investment