A ZEN Approach to Post-2015: Addressing the Range of Perspectives across Asia and the Pacific

The paper discusses key challenges faced throughout the Asia and the Pacific region as a number of its developing economies graduate from low-income status to middle-income status at the same time as the region remains home to the majority of the world's poor people and a number of fragile states. The region is gaining increased influence in the world economy but is still grappling to overcome interrelated challenges of poverty and sustainable development, so its priorities will be of significant importance in informing the contents of any post- 2015 global development framework. Drawing from the ongoing lessons of the Millennium Development Goal process, this paper suggests a conceptual framework for setting a new generation of goals and, informed by these concepts, proposes an intergovernmental approach to implementation. The "ZEN" framework stresses the distinct challenges of achieving zero extreme poverty (Z), setting country-specific "Epsilon" benchmarks for broader development challenges (E), and promoting environmental sustainability both within and across borders (N)

Border and Migration Controls and Migrant Precarity in the Context of Climate Change

Climate change impacts natural and human systems, including migration patterns. But isolating climate change as the driver of migration oversimplifies a complex and multicausal phenomenon. This article brings together the literature on global migration and displacement, environmental migration, vulnerability and precarity, and borders and migration governance to examine the ways in which climate-induced migrants experience precarity in transit. Specifically, it assesses the literature on the ways in which states create or amplify precarity in multiple ways: through the use of categories, by externalizing borders, and through investments in border infrastructures. Overall, the paper suggests that given the shift from governance regimes purportedly based on protection and facilitation to regimes based on security, deterrence, and enforcement, borders are complicit in producing and amplifying the vulnerability of migrants. The phenomenon of climate migration is particularly explicative in demonstrating how these regimes, which categorize individuals based on why they move, are and will continue to be unable to manage future migration flows

Modernizing the G8 summit process : final report to IDRC (May 1, 2008-December 31, 2009)

The project approach is to convene leaders and their senior advisors from varied backgrounds, with influential researchers and policy opinion leaders to debate policy options. Papers by recognized experts are commissioned and presented to gatherings of prominent actors. The focus is on developing solutions by an international cooperative effort whose objective is a more inclusive, well prepared Summit process to lead to progress on global deadlocks such as climate change and energy security. Expanding the G8 Summit to include on an equal basis, five important emerging economies (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa) would create a more legitimate member group

Overgrowing the Border? An Examination of Cascadian Culture and Cannabis Legalization

Globalization has challenged the role of borders in society, sparking interdisciplinary interest in the social reconstruction of the lines dividing the world’s population from one another. Border theorists have proposed that a few key factors promote cross-border integration: cross border policy-making, market forces, political clout, and culture [Brunet-Jailly, E. 2005. Theorizing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Geopolitics 10, no. 4: 633–49]. Perhaps because it is the least tangible and therefore most difficult to assess, the role of culture in shaping border phenomena has been the least elucidated. Our objective is to shed light on the operation of culture in borderland integration with a case study of cannabis law convergence in Cascadia, a region spanning the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington and Oregon. Through an examination of both grey and academic literature, we explore the extent to which shared culture across the border may have driven legalization of recreational cannabis, effective in each jurisdiction between 2012 and 2018