Branding for Business? Hungary and the Sustainable Development Goals

Negotiations leading to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have dominated the diplomacy of global development in the past years. The paper looks at the actions and motivations of a relatively new development actor, Hungary, which co-chaired the UN General Assembly’s Open Working Group on SDGs, and thus had a highly visible position during the talks. Hungary had a key priority of having an SDG on water related issues, driven mainly by its perceived comparative advantage in the sector. Using the insights of the literature on small state influence in multilateral negotiations, the paper argues that Hungarian diplomats used alliance building as well as reputational and framing strategies to counter the structural disadvantages of the country’s small state status, and were successful in shaping the final outcome. However, the Hungarian government did not act out of a strong commitment to sustainable global development, but rather used the forum to brand itself as an expert on water issues, with the hope of future business benefits

Brexit and UK international development policy

In this article we explore the implications of Brexit for the UK and the EU's development policies and strategic directions, focusing on the former. While it is likely that the operational process of disentangling the UK from the various development institutions of the EU will be relatively straightforward, the choices that lie ahead about whether and how to cooperate thereafter are more complex. Aid and development policy touches on a wide range of interests—security, trade, climate change, migration, gender rights, and so on. We argue that Brexit will accelerate existing trends within UK development policy, notably towards the growing priority of private sector-led economic growth strategies and blended finance tools. There are strong signals that UK aid will be cut, as successive secretaries of state appear unable to persuade a substantial section of the public and media that UK aid and development policy serves UK interests in a variety of ways

Mesmerized by enlargement:the EU’s Eastern Neighborhood Policy and New Member State transition experience

The accession of the East-Central European (ECE) countries carried a promise of enhancing and enriching the EU’s Eastern policy. The new member states had the strongest interests among EU member states to ensure that countries in the East are prosperous, stable and democratic. Yet, EU’s Eastern policy has been largely criticised for its ineffectiveness. So why have they not been able to address the shortcomings in the EU’s Eastern policies? The article argues that the ECE countries supported the way the EU’s Eastern policies were conceived and implemented because they saw it as a potent vehicle to promote their own transition experience not only in the region but also within the EU. We argue that the ECE states have experienced three types of challenges when promoting their transition experience. First, uploading to the EU level remained largely at a rhetorical level. Second, there are conceptual and practical difficulties in defining what constitutes transition experience and harnessing it, as well as coordinating its transfer between the ECE states. Finally, while using transition experience as the basis for their development assistance strategies, the ECE countries actually insufficiently conceptualised the ‘development’ aspect in these policies. Being so driven by their own experience, they have not drawn the lessons from enlargement to use in a non-accession context, especially by incorporating the broader lessons with regard to development

Are we living in a time of particularly rapid social change? And how might we know?

n an editorial for this journal a decade ago, then-Editor-in-Chief Fred Phillips asserted that social change was proceeding at hyper-speed and, moreover, that it had consequently come to outpace technological change. This paper submits these claims to empirical assay. In so doing, we address the myriad problems attendant upon determining and interpreting the sort of data that might support us in our cause. Notwithstanding the innu�merable caveats that this necessarily entails, and restricting ourselves to considering US data, we conclude that a wide range of indicators suggest that millennial Americans are not living in a time of particularly rapid social change, at least not when compared to the period 1900–1950. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the data that we have considered does not easily support a contention that significant variation in social change occurs in long wave-like cycles. The evidence is more supportive of a punctuated equilibrium model of change

Aid Allocation of the Emerging Central and Eastern European Donors

The paper examines the main characteristics of the (re)emerging foreign aid policies of the Visegrád countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), concentrating on the allocation of their aid resources. We adopt an econometric approach, similar to the ones used in the literature for analyzing the aid allocation of the OECD DAC donors. Using this approach, we examine the various factors that influence aid allocation of the Visegrád countries, using data for the years between 2001 and 2008. Our most important conclusion is that the amount of aid a partner county gets from the four emerging donors is not influenced by the level of poverty or the previous performance (measured by the level of economic growth or the quality of institutions) of the recipients. The main determining factor seems to be geographic proximity, as countries in the Western-Balkans and the Post-Soviet region receive much more aid from the Visegrád countries than other recipients. Historical ties (pre-1989 development relations) and international obligations in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq are also found to be significant explanatory factors. This allocation is in line with the foreign political and economic interests of these new donors. While there are clear similarities between the four donors, the paper also identifies some individual country characteristics

Prof. dr. Antun Bauer - inicijator i donator Zbirke Bauer i galerije umjetnina Vukovar

This article examines the profits and practices of commercial journal publishers and argues for an appropriate response from the academic community

Structural diversity in layered hybrid perovskites, A2PbBr4 or AA′PbBr4, templated by small disc-shaped amines

Y.-Y.G. and T.L. acknowledge the University of St Andrews and China Scholarship Council for funding of studentships (201603780005) and (201606280032), respectively. J.A.M. and P.L. acknowledge financial support from the Leverhulme trust (RPG-2018-065). S.B., K.S. and F.P. acknowledge financial support from the German National Science Foundation via the Projects 423895689, KO 3973/2-1 and PA 3373/3-1 and further acknowledge support by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts for the Collaborative Research Network ‘‘Solar Technologies go Hybrid’’.We present three new hybrid layered lead(II) bromide perovskites of generic composition A2PbBr4 or AA′PbBr4, which exhibit three distinct structure types. [TzH]2PbBr4, ([TzH+]= 1,2,4-triazolium), adopts a (001)-oriented layer structure, [AaH]2PbBr4, ([AaH+] =acetamidinium), adopts a (110)-oriented type, whereas [ImH][TzH]PbBr4, ([ImH+] =imidazolium),adopts a rare (110)-oriented structure with enhanced corrugation (i.e. ‘3 ×3’ type). The crystal structures of each are discussed in terms of the differing natureof the templating molecular species. Photoluminescent spectra for each are reported and the behaviours discussed in relation to the different structure of each composition.PostprintPeer reviewe

EU development policy: evolving as an instrument of foreign policy and as an expression of solidarity

This article introduces the special issue on the evolution of European Union development policy, against the background of fundamental challenges that have emerged since the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. The special issue's objective is to highlight the complex dynamics of a policy area that is called on to address the massive challenges of poverty, inequality, healthcare capacity, climate change, insecurity and weak governance in countries of the global south, and at the same time support European foreign policy objectives including political stability, migration management, access to resources and markets. In this introductory article, we attempt to sketch the broad outlines of the conceptual and practical dilemmas faced by a policy area that is supposed to be able to fix almost any problem. We observe that European development policy's evolution is driven by the tension between its raison d'etre as a concrete expression of global solidarity and international cooperation, and its increasing instrumentalisation in the service of European economic and security interests. We highlight some of the key challenges that have emerged in the last decade, including rising populist nationalism and Brexit within Europe, the changing nature of relationships between Europe and countries who receive EU aid, and the changing nature of development cooperation itself, exemplified by the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. We outline the specific contributions the articles in this special issue make to research and policy debates on the themes we raise in this introduction. We conclude that the battle between the forces of solidarity and instrumentality has evolved EU development policy into an impossibly complex arena of competing norms, practices and institutions, which raises many open questions for future research