[Introduction] This paper provides a synthesis of the multifaceted impact of the global economic crisis on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), focusing on the Pacific and Caribbean regions. It shows that the social investment agenda, which has underpinned so much of the development progress...

[Introduction] Despite notable advances in the “climate change-development” discourse and the rapid evolution of the climate-finance architecture, many of the fundamentally politicised issues that shape the existing dilemma on how to confront global climate change have been avoided or...

[Sustainable development in a multi-polar world] World leaders convened for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June 2012, marking 20 years since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and at a time of rapidly increasing pressures on the planet's ecosystems and impacts on the poor and...

[Introduction] We live in a time of transformational change, with society, economy, ecology and politics in a state of flux the world over. Of particular focus in this Working Paper are the implications for mineral-dependent economies of living in an increasingly resource-constrained world. Both...

Meeting the global commitment to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels will require collective, complementary and simultaneous action by nation states and multinational entities. This crisis, however, is additional to existing development challenges...

The Rio +20 meeting in 2012 was an opportunity for the global policy framework to review 20 years of action on Agenda 21 and what has been delivered and to whom. The ripple effects of the global economic crisis?i.e. the weakening of the insurance sector, lower demand for exports and reduced...

The world is experiencing a historic convergence of increasing demand for natural resources from emerging economies, prices at record levels across various commodity groups, a downward trend in resource supply, serious trends of ecological instability, and the rise of inequality between those...