" The achievements and legacy of the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings The Imperative of Development highlights the research and policy analysis produced by the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings. The Center, which operated from 2006 to 2011, was the first home at Brookings for research on international development. It sought to help identify effective solutions to key development challenges in order to create a more prosperous and stable world. Founded by James and Elaine Wolfensohn, the Center’s mission was to “to create knowledge that leads to action with real, scaled-up, and lasting development impact.” This volume reviews the Center’s achievements and lasting legacy, combining highlights of its most important research with new essays that examine the context and impact of that research. Six primary research streams of the Wolfensohn Center’s work are highlighted in The Imperative of Development: the shifting structure of the world economy in the twenty-first century; the challenge of scaling up the impact of development interventions; the effectiveness of development assistance; how to promote economic and social inclusion for Middle Eastern youth; the case for investing in early child development; and the need for global governance reform. In each chapter, a scholar associated with the particular research topic provides an overview of the issue and its broader context, then describes the Center’s work on the topic and the subsequent influence and impact of these efforts. The Imperative of Development chronicles the growth and expansion of the first center for development research in Brookings’s 100-year history and traces how the seeds of this initiative continue to bear fruit. "

Thirty years ago, the UN report Our Common Future placed sustainable development firmly on the international agenda. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development takes the ethical foundations of Our Common Future and builds a model that emphasizes three equally important moral imperatives – satisfying human needs, ensuring social justice, and respecting environmental limits. This model suggests sustainability themes and assigns thresholds to them, thereby defining the space within which sustainable development can be achieved. The authors accept that there is no single pathway to the sustainable development space. Different countries face different challenges and must follow different pathways. This perspective is applied to all countries to determine whether the thresholds of the sustainability themes selected have been met, now and in the past. The authors build on the extensive literature on needs, equity, justice, environmental science, ecology, and economics, and show how the three moral imperatives can guide policymaking. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development synthesizes past reasoning, summarizes the present debate, and provides a clear direction for future thinking. This book will be essential reading for everyone interested in the future of sustainable development and in the complex environmental and social issues involved.

Mounting evidence reveals that the existing scale of human enterprise has already surpassed global ecological limits to growth. This ecological reality clearly counteracts the possibility of continued exponential growth in the twenty-first century. In the absence of international, national, or state initiatives to implement a no-growth imperative founded on ecological limits, this book takes the position that local communities have an obligation to take the lead in promoting a new politics of sustainability directed at recognizing and ...

In Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender, and the Helping Imperative, Barbara Heron draws on poststructuralist notions of subjectivity, critical race and space theory, feminism, colonial and postcolonial studies, and travel writing to trace colonial continuities in the post-development recollections of white Canadian women who have worked in Africa. Following the narrative arc of the development worker story from the decision to go overseas, through the experiences abroad, the return home, and final reflections, the book interweaves theory with the words of the participants to bring theory to life and to generate new understandings of whiteness and development work. Heron reveals how the desire for development is about the making of self in terms that are highly raced, classed, and gendered, and she exposes the moral core of this self and its seemingly paradoxical necessity to the Other. The construction of white female subjectivity is thereby revealed as contingent on notions of goodness and Othering, played out against, and constituted by, the backdrop of the NorthSouth binary, in which Canada’s national narrative situates us as the “good guys” of the world.

Argues that the economy can only be improved through major changes that will make it more decentralized and cooperative, including such novel ideas as energy self-sufficiency, interest-free financing, affordable housing, local food systems and more. Original.