Alternatives to Open Burning and Open Detonation: The Disparity Between HMA and Commercial Best Practices

cisrExchange · 25.1-Cottrell Munition and explosive residues have the potential to cause long-term harm when released into the environment. Common explosives, such as TNT and RDX are toxic, with both classed as possible carcinogens.1,2 The environmental fate of explosives is complex and varied. TNT absorbs onto soil, slowly leaches, and degrades to form degradation products such as DNT, which has a higher toxicity than TNT itself.3 RDX leaches from soil more readily, degrades slowly, and can persist in the environment. The residual soil and water contamination at military ranges caused by the firing, detonation, and disposal of munitions by open burning and open detonation (OBOD) is well documented, and there has been increased attention on finding more environmentally acceptable options.4 This is reflected in the draft Lausanne Action Plan from the Second Review Conference for the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which sets out the need for stockpile survey, clearance, and destruction to be carried out with minimal environmental impacts

Government repression and citizen support for democratic rights in Africa

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Country ownership in climate finance coordination: a comparative assessment of Kenya and Zambia

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Multilateral climate finance coordination: politics and depoliticization in practice

The governance of public climate finance for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries is fragmented on both the international and national levels, with a high diversity of actors with overlapping mandates, preferences, and areas of expertise. In the absence of one unifying actor or institution, coordination among actors has emerged as a response to this fragmentation. In this article, we study the coordination efforts of the two most important multilateral climate funds, the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) and the Green Climate Fund (GCF), on the global level as well as within two recipient countries, Kenya and Zambia. The CIF and the GCF are anchored within the World Bank and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, respectively, and represent two diverging perspectives on climate finance. We find that on both levels, coordination was depoliticized by treating it as a technical exercise, rendering invisible the political divergences among actors. The implications of this depoliticization are that both funds coordinate mainly with actors with similar preferences, and consequently, coordination did not achieve its objectives. The article contributes to the literatures on coordination, climate finance, and environmental governance by showing how a response to the fragmentation of climate governance did not overcome political fault lines but rather reinforced them

The politics of climate finance coordination

• Climate finance coordination challenges reflect political differences, including divergent interests among ministries involved in the governance of multilateral climate funds.• Differences in the histories and governance of the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) and Green Climate Fund (GCF) – two key multilateral climate funds – shape debate on their respective advantages and future roles.• The multilateral funds have encouraged cross-governmental coordination at country level. However, there are competing views on which governmental actors at national level are best-suited to take responsibility for coordinating climate finance planning and implementation.• The cross-sectoral orientation of climate finance coordination contrasts with existing development coordination approaches, which emphasize coordination within separate policy sectors

Will REDD+ safeguards mitigate corruption? Qualitative evidence from Southeast Asia

High levels of faith and finance are being invested in REDD+ as a promising global climate change mitigation policy. Since its inception in 2007, corruption has been viewed as a potential impediment to the achievement of REDD+ goals, partly motivating ‘safeguards’ rolled out as part of national REDD+ readiness activities. We compare corruption mitigation measures adopted as part of REDD+ safeguards, drawing on qualitative case evidence from three Southeast Asian countries that have recently piloted the scheme: Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. We find that while REDD+ safeguards adopt a conventional principal-agent approach to tackling corruption in the schemes, our case evidence confirms our theoretical expectation that REDD+ corruption risks are perceived to arise not only from principal-agent type problems: they are also linked to embedded pro-corruption social norms. This implies that REDD+ safeguards are likely to be at best partially effective against corruption, and at worst will not mitigate corruption at all

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors

Harnessing Natural Resources for Development: New Legal Regimes for Localized Benefit Sharing in the Mining Sector

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06Between 1993 and 2012, thirty-two countries around the world adopted community development in mining laws. This new public regulation approach to addressing mining’s impact goes beyond mitigating the negative effect of mining on local communities (such as through compensation arrangements and environmental laws), to requiring firms and/or states to ensure that mining translates into real, positive social and economic gains for mining-affected communities, thereby redressing the inequitable distribution of mining’s costs and benefits. In this dissertation, I examine variation in the adoption, design, and implementation of these laws. I argue that countries adopt community development requirements into their mining laws in order to signal to foreign investors about the property rights security of their mining projects. Community development in mining laws represent the harmonization of soft and hard law, and they enhance investment security by providing a distributive justice mechanism that addresses power and information asymmetries in company-community relations. States with low public goods provision are likely to “pass the buck” to firms in designing community development in mining laws, because firms are seen as an institutional substitute for the state. Finally, the implementation of community development in mining laws depends on good design. Benefit-sharing institutions that rely on unaccountable local institutions can enables corruption and elite capture among local elites, undermining developmental gains. I test my arguments using large-n statistical analysis as well as case studies of Sierra Leone and Ghana

Cursed before production?

Big discoveries of high value natural resources can have negative economic, political, and social effects long before full production of a resource begins. While Tanzania has already experienced some tensions around the country’s gas discovery, there is consensus among scholars and practitioners that the country has thus far generally avoided experiencing economic and political problems because of the discovery. Political risks remain, however, and continued immunity to the pre-source curse, and ultimately to the resource curse, will require ongoing, sound political decisionmaking about how to react to the promise of potentially large future resource revenues

Petroleum’s potential impact on future state-society relations in Tanzania

Tanzanian citizens continue to have high expectations about the benefits that the country’s emerging petroleum sector will provide them with, yet they possess low knowledge about the sector. Policy makers should take concrete steps to rectify this knowledge-expectation gap by providing updated information in accessible and easy-to-understand formats. Revenue transparency should be encouraged, and more research should be carried out to improve understanding of how the prospect of future petroleum revenues may shape citizen attitudes and behaviors