What feeds protest participation in sub-Saharan Africa? An empirical analysis

Globally, there is a growing concern about the future of food security and its influence on social cohesion; however, these concerns vary both within and across countries. Previous research has focused on one dimension of food security to explain protest participation. Using Afrobarometer data from 31 sub-Saharan African countries across four waves of surveys from 2005 to 2015, we employ a multilevel model to account for all four dimensions of food security: availability, access, utilization and stability. We find that: (i) a negative relationship exists between higher cereal production and protests; (ii) individuals in countries with higher access to hygiene facilities are less likely to protest, and (iii) high domestic food price variability increases the likelihood of protests. These findings suggest a complex relationship between each dimension of food security and social unrest. Addressing these deficiencies can not only improve food security in the region, but can also lower some of the expected adverse impacts from a changing climate

Donor accountability reconsidered: aid allocation in the age of global public goods

Development assistance is increasingly used to fund the provision of global public goods. This has implications for the assessment of the donors’ motivation for the provision of these funds. Given the non-excludability characteristic of global public goods, the traditional classification of donor interests and recipient needs is not appropriate for analyzing donors’ aid allocation decisions. Funding for the provision of global public goods should not flow to those places with the greatest needs—as assumed by the existing aid allocation literature—but to those where they can be provided most efficiently. After explaining the theoretical rationale behind this claim, we empirically show its implication at the example of aid for climate change mitigation (a global public good). While the control for efficiency-related variables can solve the attribution problem for individual public goods, it is difficult to conceive of appropriate controls at the aggregate level. This represents a major challenge for the aid allocation literature and implies that holding donors accountable for their overall aid portfolio will become more difficult in the future

What drives the adoption of climate change mitigation policy? A dynamic network approach to policy diffusion

The requirement of bottom-up action from all the countries to deal with climate change makes it necessary to analyze the factors influencing policy adoption. This article contributes to the policy literature by shedding light on the conditions, which incentivize countries to adopt more climate mitigation policies. The theoretical argument builds on the integrated approaches to study policy diffusion, which include both internal and external determinants as explanations for the adoption of policies. While previous applications typically operationalize the latter by regional proximity, this study highlights the added value of network dependencies capturing political and cooperative interactions across countries. The article finds that the adoption of climate policies is a matter of social influence. Countries are more likely to adopt policies if they cooperate with countries that have adopted more climate policies and are in a similar structural position to countries that are active in climate protection. This article not only is an important theoretical contribution to the policy literature but also enriches our methodological and empirical understanding of climate policy diffusion