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UN Climate Change Site Up

                                                                                                 

UN has launched its new climate change site.

The Growing Problem of International Environmental NGOs

by M. K. Dorsey

A recent piece in Science, titled: "Globalization and Conservation: A View from the South" opens:

"Large international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are increasingly setting the global conservation agenda. These INGOs have developed a range of tools, e.g., Biodiversity Hot Spots (1), Global 200 Ecoregions (2), and others (3) to set priorities and to compete with each other. They often use a corporate "branding" strategy to help raise funds and to define and communicate their niches in a  crowded and competitive market. This corporate model has been very successful for fundraising: Conservation International's "Hot Spots" strategy accompanied an increase in overall annual expenditures from U.S.$27.8 million in 1998 to U.S.$89.3 million by 2004, and World Wildlife Fund U.S.A.'s "Ecoregions" program accompanied a rise in expenditures from U.S.$80 million to U.S.$121.7 million between 1997 and 2005 (4). This helped offset declines of ~50% in government and multilateral agency investment in biodiversity conservation over the past decade (5) while expanding the influence of these INGOs globally. These factors have led some to equate the operations of large INGOs with transnational corporations (6)." (FULL PDF)

This continues a discussion inaugurated by Mac Chapin (.pdf) and carried on elsewhere by Liza Grandia and other colleagues.  As well as a 2005 Anthropology News (.pdf.) item I did, titled: Conservation, Collusion and Capital. Kenny Bruno and colleagues have also tracked related matters in their "Greenwash: The Reality Behind Corporate Environmentalism" (click image).
 

Sources say that at the coming 2008 IUCN meetings in Barcelona, some may carry on the conversation, after a rather lackluster attempt to do so at the Bangkok meetings in 2004. Stay tuned.

Thoughts on China, Incremental Infrastructure, etc.

First of all, big thanks to Meir for sending around the New York Times article on China and Africa. This is a topic that has received a lot of play in the international media recently - with some commentators going as far as lumping Chinese assistance together with those from Venezuela and Iran as "Rogue Aid." (I believe it was the Foreign Policy Magazine.)

What I'm interested in is: what do you all actually think about the way China is putting its resources into developing countries? On the one hand, those who object to it say that Chinese aid is based purely on cold, hard strategic interests, and hardly has the welfare of recipient populations in mind. It employs imported Chinese labor, and pays no attention to the ethical status of regimes. On the other hand, it's not like the more invasive style of traditional development institutions like the World Bank has had a glowing record.