This edited volume on international development is a collection of papers presented at the international postgraduate conference “Development: What Now?” in Hong Kong from the 9th to 11th October 2014. With the support of the Postgraduate Students Conference Grant of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, this conference was organised by the Department of Applied Social Science of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The conference aimed to contribute in answering the vital question for the future of development studies: “What Now?” The conference explored some of the past, present and future challenges in international development. It was a grand success attracting over 60 participants from Germany, Indonesia, Canada, Italy, India, Poland, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia, Nigeria, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, the UK and Hong Kong. The participants presented their research papers on ten major themes. These included (1) Empowering People, Climate Change and Education; (2) Poverty Reduction; (3) Gender Studies; (4) Human Rights, Environment and Wellbeing; (5) Foreign Aid and Development Cooperation; (6) Security and Transnationality; (7) Economic Development; (8) Urban and Rural Development; (9) Governance, Diplomacy and Health in Development; (10) Sociology and Diversity in Psychology, Literature and Advertising. The highlights of the conference were the two defining speeches delivered by Emeritus Professor Robert J. Holton of Trinity College Dublin and The University of South Australia, and Professor Damien Kingsbury of Deakin University, Australia. These two keynote speeches, together with other outstanding conference papers, have been selected and published in this volume.

This book joins the discussion on foreign aid triggered by the rise of multiplicity of emerging donors in international development and explores the transformation of Kazakhstan from a recipient country to a development aid provider. Drawing on fieldwork in Nur-Sultan and Almaty (Kazakhstan) between 2016 and 2019, this research evaluates the philosophy and core features of Kazakhstan’s chosen development aid model and explains the factors that account for the construction of aid patterns of Kazakh donorship. This book will be of interest to scholars of Central Asia and the emerging politics of Eurasia as well as scholars of politics and aid.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Future Challenges in Sustainable Development within the Built Environment stimulates and reinterprets the demands of Responsible and Sustainable Development in the Built Environment for future action and development. It examines the methods of evaluation, the use of technology, the creation of new models and the role of human factors for examining and developing the subject over the next twenty years.

In this book Ian Goldin shows how the understanding of how nations escape poverty and achieve economic and social progress has changed as the pendulum has swung from arguments for state-led development to a preoccupation with market forces.

This book records the history of Japan’s international cooperation in education from the 1950s to 2020. It provides a crucial overview of the nearly 70 years since Japan began engaging in international cooperation in education in order to record and document these efforts that range from basic to higher education to technical and vocational education and training, and the large numbers of people involved in their respective areas of activity and specialization. The book provides useful indicators for exploring new forms of education cooperation in this age of global governance and beyond. The authors include not only researchers but also field practitioners, such as personnel from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and NGOs. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 9, 12 and 15 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book explores the intersection of gender, digitalization, and resilience in international development. Building resilience is increasingly seen as crucial when planning and implementing development programmes, enabling communities to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth. Gender plays a crucial role in the resilience of development systems, as the exclusion of women from participation can make communities more vulnerable to economic shocks, perpetuating and even worsening current levels of poverty, instability, and insecurity. Drawing on meta-data from across the world, as well as specific case studies from Ghana, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Mozambique, this book reflects on these intersections and the potential of digitalization as a democratizing tool for improving the access of women and other marginalized groups to information vital for their participation in the process of development. By outlining the importance of digitalization for addressing gender imbalances, this book draws the evidentiary lines between the role of digitalization for women and resilience as a whole. This book will be of interest to development practitioners and policy makers, as well as researchers with specialisms in gender inclusion, resilience, digitalization, and international development.