Working Papers

The humanitarian-development divide has long been a contentious debate in both academia and government. Despite the recent surge in the cost, frequency, duration and severity of humanitarian crises, humanitarian and development disciplines and communities of practice have continued to operate in silos. This article aims to bridge the humanitarian-development divide by interlinking the Agenda for Humanity and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The newly proposed context-conflict-contingency model of humanitarian-development connections constitutes the conceptual foundation, which is then tested by the findings of the network analysis of the 169 SDG targets of the 2030 Agenda and…

In light of the emphasis on “inclusion” in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this paper contends that social exclusion and inclusion are context-dependent concepts in at least three senses. First, the ideal of an inclusive society varies by country and by region. Second, different places have different histories, cultures, institutions and social structures. These influence the economic, social and political dimensions of social exclusion and the interplay among them. Third, context – where one lives – shapes access to resources and opportunities. Social inclusion is thus spatially uneven. The paper also shows how context matters, identifying some of the mechanisms by which…

Implementation of the Agenda 21 bifurcated into two tracks. While the economic and social development agenda gelled into the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the environmental protection agenda moved along a different track, represented by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), etc. This bifurcation also led to very different “domain configurations.” While there were some advantages of this bifurcation, it led to a conflict between the human development and the environmental goals. This paper presents a framework for bringing environment and development together in the UN post-2015 agenda.