Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

The link between achieving sustainable development and the principles of good governance is gaining increasing acceptance. The Rio + 20  The Future We Want Declaration, paragraph 10, stated that to achieve sustainable development goals, we need institutions at all levels that are effective, transparent, accountable and democratic. These were incorporated in Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals and have been further elaborated as indicators. To support these goals, the Friends of Governance for Sustainable Development , an informal government group, was created in the autumn of 2011. The main objective of the Friends group is to create an informal space for governments to have discussions among themselves, backed up by expert papers when requested, on issues relating to good governance and the Institutional Framework for Sustainable Development (IFSD) in relation to the d implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It builds on a rich ...

Guest blog by Oli Brown  Associate Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resources Department, Chatham House. Former UNEP  Senior Programme Coordinator, Disasters and Conflicts sub-programme. Originally published here. Stick with me here, but I’m going to try to argue that for those working in international development, bureaucracy is something to lean into, rather than reject. I realise this is a hard sell, as bureaucracy is the one thing that everyone agrees they hate. Frustration at the time wasted through infuriating processes, jumping through hoops, needless form-filling and endless signature hunts are one of the biggest causes of work stress worldwide. Fairly or not, the United Nations has become a byword for bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is not unique to the UN, of course. People I know who’ve worked in the private sector and in government say that bureaucracy  can be just as bad, or worse  in other sectors. Nevertheless, there has been much  discussion ...

Inger Andersen has been nominated by the UN Secretary General to be the next Executive Director of UNEP . She will meet with the regional groupings and then the UN General Assembly will need to confirm the nomination. At present she is Director General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in January 2015. Ms Andersen brings a passion for conservation and sustainable development with more than 30 years of experience in international development economics, environmental sustainability and policy-making, as well as in designing and implementing projects and generating on-the-ground impact. She has played a key role in supporting riparian countries on international water management and hydro diplomacy. Prior to joining IUCN, Ms Andersen held various leadership roles at the World Bank and United Nations. Most recently, she was Vice President of the Middle East and North Africa at the World Bank, and previous to that Vice President for Sustainable Development ...

Guest Blog by: Oli Brown   Associate Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resources Department, Chatham House. The original is published here .  Make no mistake, when  Erik Solheim   resigned  as head of  UN Environment  on 20th November 2018, less than two and a half years into what most likely would have been an eight-year tenure, the timing was not of his choosing. The proximate reason for his defenestration was a damning report by the UN’s internal auditors, known as the Office for Internal Oversight Services. The report excoriated his travel expenses, which amounted to nearly $500,000 spent on business-class flights and hotels over the course of 22 months. It also detailed a variety of other eye-catching issues, such as spending nearly 80% of his time out of the organisation’s Kenyan headquarters and relaxing HR rules for favoured staff members.  It is vanishingly rare for Under-Secretary-Generals (USG) in the UN system to be forced...

Guest Blog: By Greg Rogers  and Charlie Atkins (Full article can be viewed here) Climate Change, Terrorism and Actionable Intelligence In its final report to Congress in July 2004, the 9/11 Commission likened the threat from terrorism to “global disease or environmental degradation, … challenges that are transnational rather than international,” and recommended steps to unify governmental agencies and information flows, both across the foreign-domestic divide and within the U.S. intelligence community, so that the intelligence community can “assemble the puzzle pieces gathered by different agencies to make some sense of them and then develop a fully informed joint plan.” We posit that climate change and terrorism are alike in that both present uncertainty about the nature, timing and potentially catastrophic severity of future losses caused by inimical forces, and both require collaboration and collective action across national and organizational boundaries to overcome f...