WP 528 Climate Change and Development Framings: A Comparative Analysis of the Human Development Report 2007/8 and the World Development Report 2010
ISS Working Paper 528 by Des Gasper, Ana Victoria Portocarrero, and Asuncion Lera St.Clair
Abstract
The Human Development Report 2007/8 (HDR) and the World Development Report 2010 (WDR) are both devoted to the connections between climate change and development. The reports provide very different perspectives on where the key challenges reside. Their policy proposals are also different, but much less so.
This paper investigates these dissimilarities and similarities, and explores the framings in the Overviews of the two reports. It compares their conceptions of development, their normative content, the role given to human rights, and the status of proposed market solutions to issues of climate change and development. It ends by asking why, when the problem framings so significantly differ, the proposed solutions differed far less.
Keywords: climate change; problem- and policy-frames; human rights; United Nations Development Programme; World Bank
About the authors
| Des Gasper is Professor of Human Development, Development Ethics & Public Policy, at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). He studied economics, international development, policy analysis and evaluation at the Universities of Cambridge and East Anglia, in Britain, obtaining a PhD (Development Studies, University of East Anglia) in 1986. He has been at ISS from 1989, teaching in the Masters programme on Public Policy and Management, as well as courses on economics, development ethics, and discourse analysis. |
| Ana Victoria Portocarrero is a Nicaraguan economist, with a post-graduate qualification in social policies from the Central American University, and a masters degree in Politics of Alternative Development from the Institute of Social Studies where she graduated with distinction in 2010. She has done research on socio-economic issues in Central America from a social justice perspective, focusing on climate change and social justice, sustainable trade, international financial institutions' policies, national development plans, and gender, sexuality and economics. Currently she is developing a research project on the intersections between climate change, social justice and gender power relations with indigenous communities in Nicaragua. |
| Asuncion Lera St. Clair, philosopher and sociologist, is Research Leader for Climate and Development at the International Centre for Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo (CICERO) and Associated Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsens Institute in Bergen. She is President of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) and member of the editorial boards of various international journals. Her research interests are focused on critical poverty studies, climate change, development ethics, human rights and global justice, social theory and sociology of knowledge, ethics, epistemolog,; and multilateral organizations. She is a Lead Author of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for the first chapter of the Working Group II Report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. |
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Publication date: Tuesday, 29 November 2011
