While it seemed that the big climate issue had finally gained momentum both nationally and internationally, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic appears to have diverted public and political attention again. However, there are upcoming negotiations regarding climate and biodiversity addressing the larger sustainable development arena. And the incentive, at least from the stakeholder side, is to bring the climate issue back to the centre of attention. Our guest for this show is Felix Dodds. We talk with him about the role of agencies, the changes of online negotiations due to the pandemic and the use of corridors for the COPs.

Felix brings years of experience with climate conferences and the involvement of stakeholders from civil society to the table. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at the Global Research Institute and a Senior Affiliate at the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina. For 20 years, he was the executive director of the NGO 'Stakeholder Forum for Sustainable Future'. 

Questions touched upon in this episode include: 

What do insurance companies have to do with climate change?

Which role plays the global market when it comes to better climate regulations?

How has the pandemic and the use of online-communication tools changed/ impacted negotiations  and the inclusion of stakeholders?

How can stakeholders influence the arena of negotiations and make their voices heard?

And finally, why should you definitely bring a multiple socket to a climate conference?

Felix also has a website and blogs at blog.felixdodds.net, and tweets as @felixdodds. 

His forthcoming book (his 21st book publication, mentioned in the very beginning of the episode) is: Tomorrow's People and New Technology.  

Additional Links: 

Glasgow Climate Change Conference

Bloomberg Climate Coalition

Convention on biological diversity

United Nations Climate Change

Was the Covid-19 crisis the boost the world needed to come back together?

Covid-19 was a very significant incident in bringing global cooperation back on the table at a time of enormous national egocentrism. The crisis confronted industrialized countries with an existential threat - something that countries in the so-called “Global South” were experiencing all along. So, on the one hand it was a rare equalizing moment in international relations. On the other hand it also reinforced existing asymmetries: rich countries were able to quickly shut out the global dimensions of the problem through their policy options and helped themselves to vaccines, leaving the rest once more at the mercy of their charity.

With our guest expert, Prof. Siphamandla Zondi, we discuss his evaluation of global governance from the perspective of countries in the Global South and the BRICS group in particular. We learn about the added value of supranational organizations, such as the United Nations, as a platform to make all interests visible. And we look at how the current crisis cautions us not to turn our back’s on multilateralism but actively seek it out when the next global crisis hits.

Professor Zondi is currently professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg and chair of the South African BRICS Think Tank Council. He is also a member of the Africa Decolonial Research Network committed to rethinking knowledge in Africa. He has published extensively on regional and global governance, South African foreign relations, colonialism, and public health policy. One of his current publications deals with COVID-19 and the Return of the State in Africa. Find him on Twitter @siZondi

In the Research Feature we talk to Karolina Kluczewska. She currently works on a research project that investigates how competing conceptions of world order are processed in the development aid sector in Tajikistan. By looking at a row of Western and non-Western aid donors’ interactions with this particular recipient country, she gathers evidence on how their different approaches to world order are perceived locally and how these competing stimuli shape Tajikistan’s relations with such a diverse set of outside actors overall.

Timestamps: 

00:00: Introduction

02:50: Interview with Siphamandla Zondi

39:07: Research Feature: Karolina Kluczewska

For feedback or questions we welcome your comments directed at @GCR_21 on Twitter under the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast or you can get in touch via e-mail: [email protected].

Further reading & sources:

Siphamandla Zondi (2021): COVID-19, Resilience and South-South Cooperation

& (2019): BRICS and Africa in perspective

Kluczewska, Karolina (2019): Questioning local ownership: Insights from donor-funded NGOs in Tajikistan

While in regions like Europe and North America national vaccination campaigns have been picking up speed over the past months, the less well-off majority of the world has seen little to no vaccine supplies.

Why does it have to be like that?

Is there a moral obligation to make health innovations easily available globally?

What about the intellectual property rights of the researchers and creators of these innovations, should they not profit from their work?

Podcast host Prof Sigrid Quack discusses these and other questions with our guest expert, Professor Susan Sell, who echoes a growing consensus that our intellectual property regime, that is so essential for 21st century intellectual monopoly capitalism, is hampering global health outcomes - not just in the current pandemic.

Susan Sell is an eminent expert on the politics of intellectual property, trade, investment, private power and the international political economy more broadly. She is “RegNet” Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University at Canberra. Her publications include books like Private Power, Public Law: the Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, as well as articles and a recent special issue on Political Economies of Global Health.

In our Research Feature, we continue our series on Internet Governance Research at the Centre. This time, we speak to Dr Janet Hui Xue about her project on “Personal Data in the Digital Economy”, in which she compares how the collection and use of personal data is being governed in the EU and China. Janet analyses the tools and governance models that have been tried in either the EU or China to strike a balance between business innovation and the protection of consumer rights in the context of personal data.

If you have feedback or questions for us, we look forward to your comments to our twitter account @GCR_21 via the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast or you can get in touch via e-mail: [email protected].

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Introduction

03:52 - Patents, Profits & Pandemics: Interview with Susan Sell

39:47 - Research Feature: Janet Hui Xue

Further reading & Sources: 

Ugo Pagano (2014): The crisis of intellectual monopoly capitalism

Nature Editorial: A patent waiver on COVID vaccines is right and fair, Nature 593, 478 (2021)

By 2100, it is projected that 80-90% of the world population will live in cities. What will these cities look like? What will people's lives in those cities look like? 

The answers to these questions will be largely determined by how cities respond to many of the global trends and challenges they already face today: migration and demography, globalization, climate change, and of course contagious diseases. 

After all, large cities around the world were the places where the Covid-19 pandemic hit first and its impact was probably felt most strongly. This applied not only to the social and economic function associated with city centers, but also to their cultural and civic role as spaces for communal engagement and creativity. The drastic impact on city dwellers' lives has led many to question the "urban normal" and revitalized the idea of cities as hubs for innovation and experimentation for a more sustainable future. What can we learn from the experiences and the experiments of municipal authorities and urban communities over the course of this crisis to better face the challenges of our coming urban 21st century? 

We discussed these questions and more with Dr Aziza Akhmouch, Head of the Cities, Urban Policy and Sustainable Development Division (@OECD_local) at the OECD (@OECD), where she manages a diverse team of analysts and economists advising national governments on new data, evidence and guidance on a wide range of policies to encourage smart, inclusive, competitive and sustainable cities. 

In the Research Feature segment, Dr Carolina Aguerre, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, introduces her project on “Internet governance and data issues: future paths of cooperation mechanisms?“ where she looks at questions concerning possibilities for cooperation in polycentric Internet governance in the age of big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI).  

Find more of Carolina‘s research on Internet governance in Latin America here (PDF) or on digital trade here (PDF). 

If you have feedback or questions for us, we look forward to your comments to our twitter account @GCR_21 via the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast or you can get in touch via e-mail: [email protected]. 

Our guests of this episode are also on Twitter: @Akhmouch and @carolinaaguerre 

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Introduction

03:45 - Interview with Aziza Akhmouch

40:54 - Research Feature: Carolina Aguerre

Further reading: 

OECD briefing note: Cities Policy Responses to Covid-19

Champion Mayors Initiative 

UN HABITAT: Cities and Pandemics: Towards a more just, green and healthy future 

The Future of Conviviality in  a City Reshaped by the Pandemic, presentation of Deyan Sudjic, Design Museum London 

The 100-million-city (The Guardian)

With the spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) quickly found itself caught between calls to resolve the crisis and accusations of having delayed an efficient pandemic response in the interest of certain member states. While expectations were high for the WHO to deliver on its mandate as guardian of global health, countries with self-interested agendas undermined the WHO‘s role by providing insufficient funding and engaging in forum shopping.

How can the WHO rise to the enormous challenge of  promoting good health and well-being globally in spite of these impediments? What role do other actors of the global health architecture play, and how do they interact with the WHO? And what impact do private-public-initiatives or other less formal institutions like the G20 have on the future of global health governance?

We had the chance to discuss these and other questions with Prof. Dr. Anna Holzscheiter, Chair of Political Science with a focus on international politics at TU Dresden and the head of the research group 'Governance for Global Health' at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB).

In our ‘Research Feature’, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn introduces his state-of-the-art work on the usefulness of blockchain technology for climate finance and for improving the input and output legitimacy of climate governance. He tries to map the possibilities and limits of techno-centric climate governance by asking: Can new emerging blockchain experiments actually enable outputs that reduce greenhouse gas emission? Follow this link to find his latest paper!

For additional information on the episode, visit our website. We look forward to your feedback or questions on Twitter: @GCR_21 ! Use the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast Or send us an e-mail: [email protected].

Our guests of this episode are also on Twitter: @AHolzscheiter and @MalcolmCV

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction, 

03:45 - Interview with Anna Holzscheiter,

35:18 - Research Feature

Further reading: 

Laura Pantzerhielm, Anna Holzscheiter, Thurid Bahr (2019): Governing effectively in a complex world? How metagovernance norms and changing repertoires of knowledge shape international organization discourses on institutional order in global health,Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Further Reading by Anna and her research group 'Governance for Global Health': Publications GOGH

Jan Aart Scholte, Soetkin Verhaegen, Jonas Tallberg (2021): Elite attitudes and the future of global governance, International Affairs, Vol. 97, Issue 3, May 2021, Pages 861–886.

COVID-19 has uncovered the interdependencies of our globalized era and revealed how quickly interruptions in this system translate into peoples everyday lives all around the globe. So how has “the world” fared in (politically) managing this challenge as a whole? Have we succeeded in cooperating globally to overcome this crisis? And what does our response to this one tell us about any challenges of the future, such as the climate change emergency?

A couple of weeks ago, our host Prof. Jan Aart Scholte spoke with Dr Richard Ponzio, Director of the "Global Governance, Justice & Security“ Program and Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. He wanted to know: Does traditional multilateral cooperation have a future? What will diplomacy post-COVID-19 look like? And what role could private actors play in the global cooperation architecture of the future?

As a mode of global cooperation, multilateralism has been under strain long before the onset of the pandemic, as certain actors have been contesting either its functionality or even its value altogether. Evidence of an increasingly fragile internationalism, where great powers instrumentalize institutions for geopolitical calculations, has loomed not just since the protectionist turn of the Trump administration. However, Richard sees reason to be mildly optimistic about how this crisis will be dealt with, given, for instance, the United States‘ return to a more international profile under the Biden administration.

In our ‘Research Feature’ segment we talk to Michele Tedeschini about his work on the legacy of the New International Economic Order and how its ideas still resonate in today’s international relations and influence the relationships of countries of the so-called “Global South” with each other, and with the industrialized nations of “the West”.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction

02:55 - Interview with Richard Ponzio

46:00 - Research Feature: Michele Tedeschini

For further info on Michele‘s work see his website or follow him on twitter: @mtedeschini. You can find the edited volume „Contingency in International Law“ here, and Michele‘s paper here. 

If you have feedback or questions for us, we look forward to your comments to our twitter account @GCR_21 via the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast or you can get in touch via e-mail: [email protected].

If you have any questions for Richard, follow him on twitter: @RichardPonzio! 

Further Reading by Richard Ponzio:

„Coping with New and Old Crises“

„Perils and pitfalls of America‘s return to the multilateral order“

For over a year now, Covid-19 and its effects have taken centre-stage in the life of people around the world. From day-to-day private matters to big decisions of international politics and the global economy, few things are left unchanged by the pandemic. It has uncovered the extreme interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of our globalized era. So how has “the world” fared in managing this challenge? Have we succeeded in cooperating globally to overcome this crisis, and what does our response to this one tell us about any challenges of the future, such as the climate change emergency?

To our first guest on “Cooperadio”, Professor Thomas Hale of Oxford University, the Coronavirus pandemic is a “wake-up call to the weakness of our current efforts in cooperation and the need to strengthen them to anticipate the crises to come.” It has demonstrated just how unprepared the international system is to deal with such fundamentally transnational threats and exposed once more the problematic effects of (overt or covert) nationalism and national self-interest.

With show host Professor Jan Aart Scholte, he discusses different actors' and institutions' potential for managing the global crises of the 21st century. They look, among other things, at how the pandemic challenges our preconception of the appropriateness of states intervening in societies for “the greater public good”, and what lessons we can draw from this for the analysis of global governance in the future.

In our ‘Research Feature’ segment we talk to Alena Drieschova about her work on Representants and International Orders and about how international politics can be witnessed in our everyday lives.

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Introduction

02:43 - Interview with Thomas Hale

22:33 - Research Feature: Alena Drieschova

You can find more information on our website. 

If you have feedback or questions for us, we look forward to your comments to our twitter account @GCR_21 via the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast or you can get in touch via e-mail: [email protected]. 

If you have any questions for Thomas, follow him on twitter: @thomasnhale or find out more about his work on his University of Oxford website. The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker is available on this site.

For further info on Alena‘s work see her personal website.