Emerging Voices features regular contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Blair Glencorse, executive director of the Accountability Lab. He analyzes the problems plaguing Nepal’s colleges and universities and argues for higher education as a crucial concern on the post-2015 development agenda.

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Last week an Egyptian court sentenced over three dozen people working for foreign NGOs to prison terms for “receiving illegal funds from abroad and operating unlicensed organizations.” These convictions are not just a sign of a weak and faltering democratic transition. By discouraging the formation of a vigorous civil society, they also strike a fundamental blow to the sustainability of freedom and democracy in Egypt over the long term.

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Emerging Voices features regular contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from
Dr. Ashok Sircar, India program director at Landesa, a global development nonprofit that works to secure land rights for the world’s poor. Here, he analyzes the obstacles preventing Indian women from exercising their right to inherit land and discusses potential policy solutions.

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Yesterday I wrote about the just-released UN High-Level Panel (HLP) report on post-2015 development goals. The focus of the report on global partnerships for inclusive development—extending beyond aid, to tackle the basic rules of the global economy—got me thinking about a relatively arcane but increasingly important set of rules called Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). BITs are treaties between governments that guarantee foreign investors a number of rights, including protection against expropriation and limitations on capital controls and performance requirements, with the goal of promoting foreign investment by protecting investors from unfair and arbitrary treatment by capital-importing governments. These treaties also give private foreign investors the unique ability to bring suits against sovereign governments in binding international arbitration, called an “investor right of action.” So, are these kinds of global economic rules good or bad for inclusive development?

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Last week the UN High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda released its long anticipated report: A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development. I’ve finally had time to give the long report a good read. It is an aspirational manifesto, reflecting a “new mainstream” in development thinking that departs substantially from the development thinking of the 80s, 90s, or even the 2000s.

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Last week on the Ask CFR Experts feature, I took on the question of how Zimbabwe and other African countries can best improve educational quality. Noting that educational failures are often due as much to corruption as to scarce resources, I recommended greater transparency in school expenditures. As I write: Read more »

In an article yesterday on CNN, CFR senior fellow Thomas Bollyky surveyed the tension between two leading global health concerns: protecting pharmaceutical firms’ intellectual property (IP) and improving access to medication for the global poor. As he explains: Read more »

The Belo Monte dam in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon basin has been at the center of controversy concerning hydropower infrastructure projects since protest of the project began in 2008. The conflict surrounding the dam, set to be the third largest in the world in terms of capacity, brings into stark relief the difficulty of balancing the infrastructure needs of a rapidly developing country with the individual needs of those such projects often affect or displace.

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In a post this week on her blog (reposted on Devex), CFR senior fellow Shannon O’Neil analyzed trends in inequality across Latin America. The region has long been among the world’s most unequal, but O’Neil writes that this is changing. As she explains: Read more »

The Revenue Watch Institute has just released its 2013 Resource Governance Index and accompanying report, measuring countries’ transparency and accountability in the governance of oil, gas, and mining on four criteria: legal framework, transparency levels, checks and balances, and the broader governance context. The Index assesses fifty-eight countries—which together produce 85 percent of the world’s oil, 90 percent of diamonds, and 80 percent of copper. Of the fifty-eight countries studied, forty-seven were found to fall short on basic standards of openness and accountability.

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