By George Ingram, Susan Reichle On May 3, 2023, the Brookings Center for Sustainable Development hosted a public event on the recently released USAID Policy Framework. USAID Deputy Administrator Isobel Coleman presented the highlights, followed by a panel representing USAID and civil society discussing specific aspects of the framework. Generating a conversation around USAID’s roles and objectives as articulated in the Policy Framework could not be more timely in this era of growing development and geopolitical challenges. The Policy Framework brings together principal USAID policies, objectiv ..read more

By George Ingram, Jonathan Papoulidis The U.S. Department of the Treasury has called on the World Bank to evolve in response to a confluence of global crises that are upending development progress and threatening people and planet. Treasury will soon extend this evolution mandate to other multilateral development banks (MDBs) as part of a campaign that, if successful, would not only reshape global development finance but the development paradigm itself. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen noted last month that alongside the Bank’s twin goals to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity, a fo ..read more

By Cem Karayalcin, Harun Onder Climate change is set to transform the nature we live in, threatening the poor and vulnerable more than anyone else. Many people, including the World Bank Group in its draft Evolution Roadmap, have suggested including “resilience” as a central criterion of development. However, unlike other criteria such as income levels, resilience is neither well defined nor easily measured. In a new study, we revisit the definition of resilience, argue that it is not the inverse of “fragility” and describe how economic institutions affect the trade-off between the two. Resilie ..read more

By Vinod Thomas Economic growth has taken precedence over environmental protection on the premise that raising living standards for people now must have priority over preserving nature for future generations. But this way of thinking runs into trouble when the destruction of natural capital rises to such a height that it blocks growth itself. The crucial question is whether runaway climate change puts to rest the growth-versus-environment dichotomy, necessitating that they be seen as the two sides of the same coin. The answer is an unambiguous yes at the global level, and a qualified yes at th ..read more

By Anthony F. Pipa In this first season of the “Reimagine Rural” podcast, I talked to local leaders, investors, and small-business owners from rural towns across the U.S. that are making progress amid economic and social change. We don’t often hear about what is going right in rural America. The podcast gave me an opportunity to visit bright spots—or at least places that have begun to emit a strong, steady glow—and glean lessons to help scale up success in other rural communities across the country. The places were exceptionally diverse: geographically, racially, and economically.* Yet across ..read more

By Glenn Denning July 24 to 26, 2023, in Rome, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres will convene a U.N. Food Systems Stocktaking Moment, the first global follow-up to the 2021 Food Systems Summit. The event will provide opportunities for nations to review commitments made during the summit and share success stories and evidence of transformation. Africa will likely be in the spotlight in the search for progress in ending hunger, improving food security, and building resilience in the face of climate change. Almost two decades ago, on the fringes of an African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, th ..read more

By Juan Caballero, Marco Fengler On April 14th, 2023, India is set to overtake China as the world’s most populous country. This historic event marks a turning point in global demography, with India reassuming a position it last held in the 1700s as part of the Mughal Empire. The global consumer class—India or China? At the turn of the century, the global consumer class (those spending more than $12 a day in 2017 PPP) was a western concept, and global brands were western brands, as the rest of the world was too poor to afford them. Today, more than half of the world’s consumers live in Asia, le ..read more

By Wolfgang Fengler, Homi Kharas The global debate around climate change is heated. Many argue that we must fundamentally change the way we move, eat, fuel our factories, and heat and cool our homes. And they do so with reason. Should emissions evolve in line with past trends, we are set to exceed the GHG concentration levels consistent with the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement already by 2031, according to projections by World Data Lab’s World Emissions Clock. Can humanity change fast enough to escape this fate? Can richer countries break unsustainable patterns? What about emerging ma ..read more

By Anthony F. Pipa On December 27, 2022, the New York Times published an essay I wrote calling for a renaissance in federal rural policy. My motivation for writing the article was borne from a frustration of the media’s obsession with rural politics—that is, who in rural America is voting for whom, and why—with little regard or attention to rural policy, or how federal, state, and local governments could do things differently to help rural places to thrive. Federal policy has historically played an important role in helping rural places contribute to American economic and social life, but it i ..read more

By Amb. Sarah Mendelson The concept of “American exceptionalism” has a long history. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines American exceptionalism as the “idea that the United States of America is a unique and even morally superior country for historical, ideological, or religious reasons.” What if American exceptionalism has a different meaning when compared with other industrialized countries? What if, beyond the dominant positive narrative, there lies a negative one? In 2015, the global community adopted the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with the watchwords “leave n ..read more