Jim Whitman

The Millennium Development Goals and Development after 2015

Abstract Five years from the end of the 15-year span of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) it is already plain that progress has been patchy and that the larger goals will not be met. The scale and profile of the MDGs will make them subject to eventual success or failure judgments and ‘lessons learned’ analyses, but the evidence of the past decade and current trajectories are sufficient to reveal our conceptual and operational shortcomings and the kinds of reorientation needed to ensure that the last five years of the MDGs will exhibit positive momentum rather than winding-down inertia. Such reorientations would include prioritising actors over systems; disaggregated targets over global benchmarks; qualitative aspects of complex forms of human relatedness over technical ‘solutions’; and the painstaking work of developing country enablement over quick outcome indicators, not least for the purpose of sustainability. Thinking and planning beyond 2015 must be made integral to the last five years of the MDGs, for normative as well as practical reasons.

The governance of nanotechnology

Despite the promises made for nanotechology, its direction and momentum as it has developed to date already pose very considerable problems of regulation and control in quite fundamental ways. This article will review these difficulties under four themes. First, the principal agents for framing governance agreements (states) are also the principal proponents of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Second, the speed of new advances in nanotechnology and the reach of their implications are already outpacing our means of social deliberation. Third, as the products and processes of nanotechnology become more widespread and more embedded, controlling pernicious applications will be every bit as vexed as the abuse of biological knowledge is currently. Finally, military applications are already underway, so a combination of realist fears and competitive economic drives is likely to disadvantage under-developed countries. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Governance Challenges of Technological Systems Convergence

The convergence of several technological systems (especially nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and robotics) has now been adopted as a strategic goal by several countries, most notably the United States and those of the European Union. The anticipated benefits and related fears of competitive disadvantage have brought together a wide range of interested parties, governmental and nongovernmental. In the rush to enter and/or dominate this arena, the benign promise of converging technologies (CT) are highlighted, although a range of risks and less welcome (if difficult to quantify) implications are at best understated. What, then, are the prospects for exercising governance over the technological systems we are busy creating—and the uses to which they might be put? What will it mean to speak of “global governance” in a world in which the technological promise of CT has been fulfilled?

The Kosovo Refugee Crisis: NATO's humanitarianism versus human rights

(2000). The Kosovo Refugee Crisis: NATOs humanitarianism versus human rights. The International Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 4, The Kosovo Tragedy The Human Rights Dimensions, pp. 164-183.

Global Dynamics and the Limits of Global Governance

The best-known texts on governance and global governance describe the ways in which globalising forces facilitate the creation or consolidation of new centres of power, authority and competence outside the exclusive domain of nationstates. These works analyse the outcomes of the proliferation of transnational dynamics of many kinds—from the generation and consequences of pollution to the electronic transfer of money and the growth of social movements. Governance studies are also a theoretical response to a distinct, if nascent, world politics, based on the accumulating evidence that international politics is no longer an impermeable actor realm. Much of the pioneering work on governance and global governance has therefore focused on ‘‘. . . the growth of institutions unique to transnational rather than territorial political spaces’’; and on the tensions and deficits opening up between governments and new or newly empowered sites of governance. But what then is ‘‘global’’ about global governance? James Rosenau makes an important distinction, to which the global governance literature largely conforms:

Developing country health systems and the governance of international HIV/AIDS funding

Donor country initiatives for the prevention and mitigation of HIV/AIDS are not a matter of simple burden sharing. Instead, they have brought in their wake many of the complexities and unforeseen effects that have long been associated with more general overseas development assistance. In the case of funding directed toward HIV/AIDS, these effects are by no means either secondary or easily calculable. It is widely acknowledged that there is no consensus framework on how these impacts may be defined, no framework/toolkit for the evaluation of impacts and no longitudinally significant data that could provide the substance for those evaluations. The subject of this study focuses not on the health outcomes of funding but on how donor-recipient relations could be better deliberated, negotiated and coordinated. We argue that effective leadership and governance of developing country health systems for HIV/AIDS work requires a reconfiguration of how donor-recipient relations are conceived and contracted, and for this purpose, we propose an adaptation of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Paris Declaration principles of aid effectiveness.

Human rights in crisis: What kind? How deep?

Human rights would amount to very little if they were not a lived expectation. The black letter of the law – in human rights as in most other areas of law – gains its strength from broadly shared understandings that the law formalises and embodies social norms. Generally speaking, the phrase ‘law-abiding societies’ is applied to those where the enforcement of the law is exceptional and not an outcome of extensive surveillance and policing. In cases when a law is widely thought to be outdated or inappropriate, or when violations are both widespread and routine, it is clear that a social norm and codified law directly conflict – and when they do, at least in democratic societies, it is often the catalyst for legal reform or repeal. The history of female enfranchisement in several countries illustrates this, as does changing social attitudes towards certain classes of drugs currently. However, sometimes laws are drafted and enacted on a clear understanding that they are contrary to prevailing norms, with a view to directing or forcing the pace of change. Civil rights legislation in the United States of the 1960s is a clear instance of this. The history of the legal codification of human rights since 1948 provides innumerable configurations of legal-social adaptations, but in aggregate it is also a history of normative transformation, both within and between states. The effect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was to make relations of absolute power anathema. The striking, historic significance of this principle is perhaps somewhat dimmed in a world in which the human rights regime is so deeply embedded in social, legal and political arenas, but as one scholar expressed the meaning of the European Convention on Human Rights:

Political Processes and Infectious Diseases

From the end of the Second World War, official pronouncement and public expectation in developed countries moved steadily toward the view that infectious disease was essentially conquered. There was a widely shared perception that although there remained large areas of the world still suffering the ravages of a variety of diseases, these could be met with the rapid pace of medical and scientific progress – or more directly, by the extension of existing mechanisms of control and cure. Postwar advances in material well-being and the attendant improvements in health and longevity, the introduction of penicillin and a range of vaccines, and a burgeoning faith in scientific and technological prowess gave this view a certain credence. In 1948, US Secretary of State George Marshall proclaimed that the conquest of all infectious diseases was imminent; in 1969, the US Surgeon-General William H. Stewart expressed his confidence that we had reached the frontiers in the field of contagious diseases.1