Niheer Dasandi

The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: from 25 years of inaction to a global transformation for public health

The Lancet Countdown tracks progress on health and climate change and provides an independent assessment of the health effects of climate change, the implementation of the Paris Agreement, 1 and th ...

Governing the UN sustainable development goals: interactions, infrastructures, and institutions.

Three of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concerned health. There is only one health goal in 17 proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Critiques of the MDGs included missed opportunities to realise positive interactions between goals. Here we report on an interdisciplinary analytical review of the SDG process, in which experts in different SDG areas identified potential interactions through a series of interdisciplinary workshops. This process generated a framework that reveals potential conflicts and synergies between goals, and how their interactions might be governed.

Tweeting alone? An analysis of bridging and bonding social capital in online networks

In this article, we test Putnam’s claim that online interactions are unable to foster social capital by examining the formation of bridging and bonding social capital in online networks. Using Burt’s concepts of closure and brokerage as indicators, we observe networks formed through online interactions and test them against several theoretical models. We test Putnam’s claim using Twitter data from three events: the Occupy movement in 2011, the IF Campaign in 2013, and the Chilean Presidential Election of the same year. Our results provide the first evidence that online networks are able to produce the structural features of social capital. In the case of bonding social capital, online ties are more effective in forming close networks than theory predicts. However, bridging social capital is observed under certain conditions, for example, in the presence of organizations and professional brokers. This latter finding provides additional evidence for the argument that social capital follows similar patterns online and offline.

Does poverty cause conflict? Isolating the causal origins of the conflict trap

Does poverty cause civil conflict? A considerable literature seeks to answer this question, yet concerns about reverse causality threaten the validity of extant conclusions. To estimate the impact of poverty on conflict and to determine whether the relationship between them is causal, it is necessary to identify a source of exogenous variation in poverty. We do this by introducing a robust instrument for poverty: a time-varying measure of international inequalities. We draw upon existing theories about the structural position of a country in the international economic network—specifically, the expectation that countries in the core tend to be wealthier and those on the periphery struggle to develop. This instrument is plausibly exogenous and satisfies the exclusion restriction, which suggests that it affects conflict only through its influence upon poverty. Instrumental variables probit regression is employed to demonstrate that the impact of poverty upon conflict appears to be causal.

Understanding state preferences with text as data: Introducing the UN General Debate corpus:

Every year at the United Nations (UN), member states deliver statements during the General Debate (GD) discussing major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on governments’ perspectives and preferences on a wide range of issues, but have largely been overlooked in the study of international politics. This paper introduces a new dataset consisting of over 7300 country statements from 1970–2014. We demonstrate how the UN GD corpus (UNGDC) can be used as a resource from which country positions on different policy dimensions can be derived using text analytic methods. The article provides applications of these estimates, demonstrating the contribution the UNGDC can make to the study of international politics.

The Donor’s Dilemma: International Aid and Human Rights Violations*

Donor governments face a dilemma when providing development aid to states that violate human rights. While aid may contribute to positive development outcomes, it may also contribute to rights violations committed by these regimes. This article provides a conceptual framework for donors to address this dilemma in a normatively justified way. Drawing on recent methodological advancements in normative political theory, it develops a distinctively political framework of dilemmas, suggesting three models: complicity , double effect and dirty hands . It considers this framework in the context of development aid, discussing the relevant considerations for donors in different cases. The article demonstrates that an approach to development assistance that acknowledges political realities does not have to be normatively silent.

The global governance of development:development financing, good governance and the domestication of poverty

In this chapter we examine the global governance of the development project: the modern effort to reduce world poverty that began after the end of the Second World War. We pay particular attention to the dominant ideas that have shaped the system and continue to shape its future. We agree with the editors of this volume that ‘all forms and projects of governance are intrinsically ideological’ and that these ideas serve to constitute the structures of the global political economy and act as a source of power. In the chapter we apply this to the global governance of development and, in doing so, identify three foundational ideas that explain the structure of the governance system: (1) the belief that poverty is predominantly caused by domestic factors, such as difficult geography, bad policies, corruption, weak institutions, lack of savings or culture; (2) the belief that underdevelopment is a function of a lack of resources – usually financial, but also technical or human – and that this can be tackled with a sufficient infusion of capital; and (3) the belief that the key to effective aid and long-term development is for countries to build strong and robust institutions, such as the rule of law, multi-party democracy, effective bureaucracy, private property and free markets – in short, to follow the rubric of ‘good governance’.