Sustainable Development in the Arab Revolution
CISDL Legal research Fellow Kishan Khoday
In this UNDP research paper, Kishan Khoday explores the nexus between the commodity boom and the emergence of social accountability movements for change. The world is passing through a historic convergence of increasing demand for natural resources from emerging economies, historic prices across various commodity groups, a downward trend in resource supply, serious trends of ecological instability, and the rise of inequality between those who develop and profit from such resources and the communities that host them. As the world marks fifty years since the passage of the UN Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, natural resources are once again changing the geopolitical landscape of countries around the world. Debates over resource sovereignty are also accompanied by a dramatic rise in social movements for equity and justice. Profit-led growth, in the form of record commodity prices and corporate profits have been coupled with a growing gap between urban industrialists and market speculators on the one hand and rural communities on the other hand who live on a treasure of natural assets but are often excluded from benefit-sharing while also suffering the impacts of ecological change.
Paper available for download SustDev_as_Freedom_Kishan_2012