Zusammen mit der Organisation der Vereinten Nationen für industrielle Entwicklung (UNIDO) veranstaltete das DIE eine Roundtable-Diskussion über Politikmaßnahmen zur Förderung ausländischer Direktinvestitionen und der Schaffung von Linkages zwischen inländischen und multinationalen Unternehmen mit dem Ziel der Förderung inklusiver globaler Wertschöpfungsketten. Der Roundtable fand am 28. Mai 2019 in Tokio in der Universität der Vereinten Nationen statt. In ihrer Keynote betonte die äthiopische Ministerin für Handel und Industrie, H.E. Frau Fetlework Gebregziabher Abrha, dass ausländische Direktinvestitionen eine Reihe von Vorteilen für Entwicklungsländer bieten. Um jedoch mehr Wertschöpfung zu erzielen, sind starke inländische Kapazitäten erforderlich. Im Rahmen des Roundtable wurden die Erfahrungen der ASEAN-Länder bei der Förderung von Linkages zwischen inländischen und multinationalen Unternehmen erörtert, die auch für andere Regionen von Nutzen sein könnten. Darüber hinaus stehen Entwicklungsländer vor der Herausforderung, ausländische Direktinvestitionen anzuziehen. Axel Berger, wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am DIE, erörterte die Chancen und Herausforderungen eines internationalen Investment Facilitation Rahmenwerks, das derzeit in der WTO diskutiert wird, für die Förderung ausländischer Direktinvestitionen, die eine nachhaltige Entwicklung in Entwicklungsländern unterstützen.
Policy Round Table: left, Sébastien Treyer (Executive Director, IDDRI); right, Rémy Rioux (CEO, Agence française de développement) Source: Damien Barchiche
The long lasting and intensive cooperation of French and German development politics dates back to the signature of the Élysée treaty in 1963. The treaty of Aachen, which was signed in January 2019, is designed to strengthen this cooperation and enhance joint opportunities to achieve global sustainable development – both regarding the cooperation with bilateral partners in the global South as well as within supranational and multilateral fora like EU, UN, G7 or G20.
During a workshop in Berlin, organized jointly with the French Institut du Développement Durable et des Relations Internationales/Institut d’études politiques de Paris (IDDRI), on 5 April 2019, recent research regarding Franco-German development cooperation was discussed. The considered topics reached from the national institutional settings over bilateral cooperation to the coordination at the EU and the multilateral level. Findings were illustrated by concrete examples (Sahel Alliance, climate change mitigation, populisms, cooperation with the partner countries India and Morocco). About 40 experts from the French and German ministries, the implementing agencies, civil society as well as international organizations discussed the research results and provided important input for further analyses as well as political debates. The workshop closed with a policy round table including the CEO of the French development bank (AFD) and representatives of BMZ, the French foreign ministry as well as KfW, who provided an outlook on the future of French-German cooperation.
Development studies aim to understand the root causes of poverty and its reproduction and how social inequalities emerge and are stabilized. This is a broad endeavour with a number of academic disciplines contributing, with quite a few success stories if we look at the economic and the social dimensions. However, while maintaining the focus on human wellbeing, we ought to change the mainstream understanding of this task and need to include the natural environment and its threats in the research on development.
In mainstream development studies, economists focus on economic structures and incentives that keep productivity and growth rates low, and at factors that make it difficult for developing countries to establish sectors with a higher valued added, either by integrating themselves in global value chains or into regional markets. They may also look at labour markets and at social policies in the broadest sense and their (in-)effectiveness in reducing poverty and inequality. Political scientists, for their part, are concerned with institutions and governance relations for similar reasons while other social scientists want to understand the social categories and processes that originate discrimination of specific groups of people and thus impact on their political and economic participation – understanding societal power relations is important to them.
How does the environment come into this line of research? The disciplines established subdisciplines that specialise on the environment. Some examples: economists look at efficiency in natural resource use and at the most effective policy instruments for decarbonizing production and consumption. Political scientists are interested in the negotiation dynamics of multilateral environmental agreements and institutions that facilitate their implementation, and in the factors that promote or hinder environmental policies and their implementation at national and local levels. Sociologists, in turn, analyse the distributive effects of environmental policies, be they global or national, or linked to external interventions by conservationists or development cooperation.
The mainstream perspective needs to shift
This specialization was helpful, but did not change the mainstream of development studies. Most research on poverty and social inequalities – be it in the North or in the South – ignores the environmental dimension of changes in human development. This is dangerous. The cumulative environmental impacts of human activity since the industrial revolution are likely to make the earth uninhabitable for the human species within this century if business as usual continues
Global warming due to high levels of greenhouse gas emissions reduces agricultural productivity in most regions of the world and increases water stress; increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events may have disruptive effects on infrastructures and stability of supply with food and energy. Global warming alone may thus lead to radical destabilization of societies that increasingly face situations of stress.
Adaptation to global warming is made more difficult by other environmental stressors such as decreasing availability of sufficient water in good quality; decreasing soil fertility; increasing loss of biodiversity; rising levels of pollution in the oceans (which also are increasingly acid due to rising absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere).
Development successes – and resulting challenges
In the last 20 years, the world has seen incredible rates of poverty reduction and of rising incomes for large shares of populations in Asia, and also in Latin America (less in Africa). This is what development studies and policies are about. At the same time, however, we have seen that the unmitigated environmental impacts that go along with the growth of production and consumption have added to the threats for global and local ecosystems and their vital functions.
Social environmental research has shown that those affected by socio-economic and political exclusion are generally more vulnerable to the effects of environmental pollution and change. We are facing a world where the advances in poverty reduction may fall victim to disastrous environmental change. As Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote the future of humanity as a species is in danger, and this is a threat that forces social science to also consider dynamics beyond power differentials between social classes, and between rich and poor countries.
Avoiding this scenario requires a drastic reduction of the environmental damage associated with human prosperity in high and middle-income countries, and prospectively also in poor countries where “catching-up” development based on conventional technologies cannot be relied on anymore. Strategies to address poverty and inequalities cannot ignore the sustainability of ecosystems and natural resources. At the same time, strategies for protecting the environment and the global commons cannot ignore the needs of poor people and countries.
Future strategies
Future strategies for ensuring human prosperity at global level will thus require considerable investment in research that improves understanding of the social practices, rules and institutions, and power relations that define human use of nature and the dynamics of its transformation (and this research in itself is subject to power relations). Social environmental research offers insights that are crucial for development studies in the 21st century – if we manage to understand development as being part of a transformation process that decarbonizes production and consumption, and that invests in the protection of ecosystems and nature-based solutions.
Three areas can be emphasised where research and teaching are needed but certainly there are more:
Transformation pathways and transformation governance (such as the work of Julia Leininger and Ines Dombrowsky with colleagues from “The World in 2050”), international cooperation for global sustainable development, and inter- and transdisciplinary research questions and methods.
This post is also published on http://www.developmentresearch.eu/?p=354, the blog run by the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes, EADI.
The leaders of the G20 will meet on 30 November and 1 December in Buenos Aires for their annual summit. They need to acknowledge that the last two years have been characterized by strong headwinds for the world economy. This time, however, it is not a mixture of poor macroeconomic policies and bad business decisions – as in 2008 when they met in Washington for their first summit – that endangers the well-being of billions of citizens around the globe. This time the threat stems from deliberate political decisions, in particular on trade.
A structural shift is underway, running much deeper than the so-called trade wars that have been triggered by the US administration. Evidence of this trend starts to abound. In the past months, measures have been taken in places such as the US and the EU which will discourage the inflow of certain foreign investments, global companies have been induced to restructure their supply chains following geopolitical considerations and an increasing number of countries have been dismissing infrastructure projects with foreign funding.
