An update on the joint project I have been involved in between the London International Development Centre and UCL on the Sustainable Development Goal-setting agenda. I am very happy to report that the first publication coming out of this initiative will be a chapter co-authored with my colleagues at UCL Department of Political Science, Niheer Dasandi and David Hudson, titled: Post-2015 Development Agenda-Setting in Focus: Governance and Institutions. It is available for download at SSRN and forthcoming in J. Waage & C. Yap, Thinking Beyond Sectors for Sustainable Development (London: Ubiquity Press, 2015). The abstract follows. Continue reading Post-2015 Development Agenda-Setting in Focus
Global Governance in the Interregnum
Together with my colleague Dr Michele Acuto at UCL, I have convened a special edition of the journal Millennium under the title Global Governance in the Interregnum. Contributors include: Madeline Carr (Aberystwyth University), Matthias Hofferberth (University of Texas), Maximilian Mayer (University of Bonn), Philipp Pattberg (VU Amsterdam), and Oscar Widerberg (VU Amsterdam). It has been very interesting drilling down on some of the core conceptual, theoretical and empirical questions surrounding global governance. The resulting special edition is intended to contribute to a very live debate on the direction of travel in global governance scholarship. We are grateful to the editors of Millennium for the Continue reading Global Governance in the Interregnum
Global Sustainable Development Governance
I have recently been involved in a joint project between the London International Development Centre and UCL to explore the post-2015 development target-setting area with a particular focus on the sustainable development goal-setting agenda. This project will hopefully result in a number of joint publications. In the meantime, it has given me an opportunity to reflect on global governance in the SDG domain. I have penned some initial thoughts in a paper posted on SSRN, an extract follows.
Effective implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may be dependent upon domestic configurations of institutions and political will, but the irreducible nature of the challenge demands a global governance component. Continue reading Global Sustainable Development Governance
Global human rights governance and orchestration
I have had an article published at the European Journal of International Relations on Global Human Rights Governance and Orchestration: National Human Rights Institutions as Intermediaries. The abstract follows:
The United Nations remains the principal international governmental organisation (IGO) for promoting human rights. However, serious concerns focus on persistent “compliance gaps” between human rights standards and domestic practice. In response and against a backdrop of growing regime complexity, UN human rights agencies have increasingly sought to bypass states by coordinating new forms of non-state and private authority. IR scholarship has captured this governance arrangement using the concept of orchestration, defined as when an international organisation enlists and supports Continue reading Global human rights governance and orchestration
Does Torture Prevention Work?
Together with Par Engstrom (UCL Institute of the Americas), I am currently in Latin America conducting fieldwork on torture prevention in the region. Specifically, our research is concerned with the question of what factors contribute to reducing the risk of torture and other ill-treatment across weakly institutionalized democratic settings in Latin America.