LSE ID responds to COP26

The LSE ID Community has been closely following the COP26 negotiations. Our community has responded in the following ways: 

• COP26: Climate accountability blog series: With contributions from Professor Kathy Hochstetler, Professor Tim Forsyth and Claudia Horn. 
• National climate institutions complement targets and policies: Professor Kathy Hochstetler co-authors an article in which the authors introduce a systematic framework for the study of climate institutions.
• Net Zero, Natural Solutions and COP26: How expert knowledge can risk closing down rather than opening up the politics of climate change: Professor Tim Forsyth reflects on the role played by expert knowledge in shaping the potential outcomes of the summit. 
• How Can Africa Adapt to Climate Change?: Hosted by the The Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and Chaired by Professor Kathy Hochstetler, the panel discussed how Africa can best adapt to climate change. The panel included Professor Christopher Gordon, Dr Richard Munang, Timo Leiter and Dr Swenja Surminski. 
• Paradigm shifts in food systems: Guest lecturers Dr Agnes Kalibata and Professor Ian Scoones discussed the Paradigm shifts in food systems as part of the Department's Cutting Edge Lecture Series. 
• Outcomes of COP26 and Where Next on Climate?: In January 22, guest lecturers Tasneem Essop and Tim Gore will discuss will explore whether the outcomes of COP26 delivered on this and whether leaders of the world delivered on climate justice for those most impacted by the climate crisis.  

Update from Professor Ken Shadlen

Professor Shadlen gave a presentation on “COVID-19 Vaccine Production in Latin America: Assessing the Landscape” at a conference organized by Georgetown University and the Hong Kong University, Intellectual Property, COVID-19, and the Next Pandemic: Diagnosing Problems, Developing Cures (November 5-6, 2021).

He also gave the keynote address (“Secondary Patents in Pharmaceuticals: Responding to the Challenges”) at an online “Dialogue Exchange Session between IP offices,” organised by the South Centre, on Thursday 25 November. Participants in the event included patent examiners and patent office officials from 8 countries (Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Egypt, Peru, Malaysia, South Africa).

Finally, as part of an initiative called the “South-North Dialogues on Democracy, Development and Sustainability,” led by a team of Brazilian academics, Zé Guedes Pinto (a professor at the Federal University of the ABC region in Sao Paulo, and visitor to LSE ID in the 2017-18 academic year) and Professor Shadlen discussed various issues around the COVID-19 pandemic and intellectual property rights. The video of their Dialogue is available here. More information on the project, and links to all of the Dialogues can be found here.

Professor Naila Kabeer on Randomised Control Trials

In a recent article for Research Outreach, Professor Naila Kebeer highlights issues with Randomised Control Trials (RCTs), including their failure to take account of history, context, or relevant findings, and questions their wide use in development planning. Professor Kabeer further discusses how the overfocus on RCT methods has led to important findings in relation to gender equality being dismissed. 

Mark Lowcock on What Next for IDA? and Humanitarian Challenges in 2022

The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling, available as Open Access

LSE ID PhD Alums, Florian Weigand and Max Gallien, collaborated in editing The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling, which has also been made available as Open Access. The volume offers a comprehensive survey of interdisciplinary research related to smuggling, reflecting on key themes, and charting current and future trends. Bringing together established and emerging scholars from around the world, The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of conflict studies, borderland studies, criminology, political science, global development, anthropology, sociology, and geography.

Cutting Edge Issues Podcast Series 

You can now listen to the latest Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice lectures via all major streaming platforms.

The Cutting Edge Issues is an annual visiting lecture series coordinated by Dr Duncan Green, Professor in Practice in the Department, and Professor James Putzel, Professor of Development Studies. These talks provide students and guests with invaluable insights into the practical world of international development, with guest lecturers from different development organisations and research institutes sharing their expertise and inviting discussion on an exciting range of issues, from responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, to climate change policy, to decolonising academia. 

Report:

Britain as a Force for Good: An Essay Collection

Mark Lowcock,
International Rescue Committee (2021)

The International Rescue Committee and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a renowned defence and security think tank, have joined forces to publish this new essay collection. It provides tangible propositions for how the UK can be a progressive force for good on the international stage. The collection explores ways in which the UK can tackle global challenges and deliver on its ‘Global Britain’ ambition across a range of areas including climate, global health, foreign policy, science and technology. Each essay offers a tangible way forward, to ensure the UK’s foreign policy can deliver for people in the country and across the globe.

Publication:

The Incoherence of Institutional Reform: Decentralization as a Structural Solution to Immediate Political Needs

Jean-Paul Faguet & Mahvish Shami 
Studies in Comparative International Development (2021)

Institutional reforms are structural changes in the rules and norms of authority, with effects that are long-term and unpredictable on government, politics, and society. But leaders may undertake them to solve unrelated, discrete, short-term political problems. Understanding the latter is key to understanding the characteristics of many real reforms, and hence their fate. We introduce the concept of instrumental incoherence and use it to construct a theory of decentralization where reform is motivated by orthogonal objectives. We show that reformers’ incentives map onto the specifics of reform design via their side effects, not their main effects, which in turn lead to the medium- and long-term consequences eventually realized. We characterize downwardly accountable decentralization, which ties the hands of the center to empower local voters, vs. upwardly accountable decentralization, which ties the hands of local government to empower the center. We use these ideas to explain highly divergent outcomes in two extreme cases, Bolivia and Pakistan, using detailed, original evidence. Our analysis likely extends to a broader class of reforms where the incentives of agents pursuing a change, and the effects of that change, are highly asymmetric in time and dimension.

Publication:

National climate institutions complement targets and policies

Kathryn Hochstetler
Science (2021)

Discussions about climate mitigation tend to focus on the ambition of emission reduction targets or the prevalence, design, and stringency of climate policies. However, targets are more likely to translate to near-term action when backed by institutional machinery that guides policy development and implementation. Institutions also mediate the political interests that are often barriers to implementing targets and policies. Yet the study of domestic climate institutions is in its infancy, compared with the study of targets and policies. Existing governance literatures document the spread of climate laws (1, 2) and how climate policy-making depends on domestic political institutions (3–5). Yet these literatures shed less light on how states organize themselves internally to address climate change. To address this question, drawing on empirical case material summarized in table S1, we propose a systematic framework for the study of climate institutions. We lay out definitional categories for climate institutions, analyze how states address three core climate governance challenges—coordination, building consensus, and strategy development—and draw attention to how institutions and national political contexts influence and shape each other. Acontextual “best practice” notions of climate institutions are less useful than an understanding of how institutions evolve over time through interaction with national politics.

Publication:

Institutionalising decarbonisation in South Africa: navigating climate mitigation and socio-economic transformation

Kathryn Hochstetler
Environmental Politics (2021)

Strong climate institutional governance is necessary for countries to meet their international climate mitigation commitments. This article shows that while South Africa steadily created climate institutions up to 2011, these failed to take hold in the following years. Also, despite the systemically critical energy sector dominating the emissions profile, these climate institutions had no purchase over it. This situation is largely due to South Africa’s political economy of energy, which gave powerful actors the sustained ability to block meaningful institutionalisation of decarbonisation in the energy sector. As a result, South Africa’s climate institutions play few of the roles expected for successful institutionalization of climate action, with energy institutions instead playing a shadow climate governance role. This case suggests that conceptions of climate institutional governance in countries where single sectors dominate in emissions and power must accommodate the roles of institutions affecting climate outcomes despite this not being their primary objective.

Publication:

Climate institutions in Brazil: three decades of building and dismantling climate capacity

Kathryn Hochstetler
Environmental Politics (2021)

What kinds of national climate institutions can solve the governance challenges that the Paris Agreement devolves to them? This article identifies three stages of climate institutions in Brazil, a major emitter of greenhouse gases through deforestation that managed to reduce such emissions for nearly a decade. It shows that a narrow definition of climate institutions that seeks purpose-built state institutions fails to capture important dynamics there, and that such institutions have little direct impact on outcomes. In Brazil’s political landscape, national presidents exercise a decisive influence on their climate ambitions and capacities. However, positive and negative feedback loops also brought some effective climate action from the layering of climate purposes into existing institutions, as well as through non-traditional institutions like private governance arrangements for agriculture.