This book explores how and why Mexico’s approach to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) implementation with the López Obrador administration is unsustainable and non-transformative, overshadowed by his vision of Mexico’s “Fourth Transformation”. Approached as a super mantra revolving around “Republican Austerity” and “First, the poor”, it provides original analysis of structural and conjunctural challenges facing Mexico as regards People-, Planet-, and Peace-centered development. The book reveals the promise “First, the poor” is inconsistent with data on Mexico’s poverty reduction (SDG1). Despite record-high spending on social programs and unmatched coverage, the recent tendency of improvement in tackling poverty is rather ambiguous from the perspective of multidimensional poverty. The book covers access to clean energy (SDG7), resilient infrastructure and sustainable industrialization (SDG9), and safeguarding biodiversity (SDG15) by examining three megaproject case studies: the oil refinery Dos Bocas, the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and the Maya Train, generating concern with the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainable development. The prospects for an ‘enabling environment’ for SDG implementation are hampered by persistently high levels of homicides and impunity (SDG16). Turning Mexico’s Armed Forces into ‘first development partner of choice’ is problematized as regards their reach in infrastructure megaprojects and social welfare programs, in the overall context of the ‘de-risking state’ favoring private capital. The result, as determined by Villanueva Ulfgard, has led Mexico further astray from sustainable and transformative development.

Revolution in Development uncovers the surprising influence of postrevolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Christy Thornton meticulously traces how Mexican officials repeatedly rallied Third World leaders to campaign for representation in global organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions. By decentering the United States and Europe in the history of global economic governance, Revolution in Development shows how Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians fought for more than five decades to reform the rules and institutions of the global capitalist economy. In so doing, the book demonstrates, Mexican officials shaped not only their own domestic economic prospects but also the contours of the project of international development itself.

This book explores how and why Mexico’s approach to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) implementation with the López Obrador administration is unsustainable and non-transformative, overshadowed by his vision of Mexico’s “Fourth Transformation”. Approached as a super mantra revolving around “Republican Austerity” and “First, the poor”, it provides original analysis of structural and conjunctural challenges facing Mexico as regards People-, Planet-, and Peace-centered development. The book reveals the promise “First, the poor” is inconsistent with data on Mexico’s poverty reduction (SDG1). Despite record-high spending on social programs and unmatched coverage, the recent tendency of improvement in tackling poverty is rather ambiguous from the perspective of multidimensional poverty. The book covers access to clean energy (SDG7), resilient infrastructure and sustainable industrialization (SDG9), and safeguarding biodiversity (SDG15) by examining three megaproject case studies: the oil refinery Dos Bocas, the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and the Maya Train, generating concern with the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainable development. The prospects for an ‘enabling environment’ for SDG implementation are hampered by persistently high levels of homicides and impunity (SDG16). Turning Mexico’s Armed Forces into ‘first development partner of choice’ is problematized as regards their reach in infrastructure megaprojects and social welfare programs, in the overall context of the ‘de-risking state’ favoring private capital. The result, as determined by Villanueva Ulfgard, has led Mexico further astray from sustainable and transformative development.

This book offers a multifaceted examination of Africa’s development into the post-2015 global agenda from a geographical perspective. As a diversified and highly applied discipline, geography has a lot to offer to global debates, nuanced analysis of problems on and the search for innovative solutions to advance the African development agenda beyond 2015. The end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) era and the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015 mark an important turning point for Africa and an opportune time to examine new challenges and opportunities that it faces. The regional disparities in MDG progress affirm an important geographic tenet that the unique yet internally differentiated socio-cultural, economic, political, ecological, biophysical and historical context give Africa distinctive challenges and opportunities that demand particular approaches to development. This edited book presents innovative contributions examining Africa’s development performance in diverse sectors during the MDG era as a basis for understanding prospects for its development in the SDG era and beyond. It offers new and innovative study perspectives and methodological approaches on urban transformation, development financing, food security, climate change, gender equality, health, and regional integration, among other topics, and useful insights for scholars, students and development practitioners. This book was originally published as a special issue of African Geographical Review, the journal of the American Association of Geographers’ Africa Specialty Group, to mark the transition from MDGs to SDGs.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is one of the world's most perceptive and original analysts of global development. In this major new work he presents a compelling and practical framework for how global citizens can use a holistic way forward to address the seemingly intractable worldwide problems of persistent extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and political-economic injustice: sustainable development. Sachs offers readers, students, activists, environmentalists, and policy makers the tools, metrics, and practical pathways they need to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Far more than a rhetorical exercise, this book is designed to inform, inspire, and spur action. Based on Sachs's twelve years as director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, his thirteen years advising the United Nations secretary-general on the Millennium Development Goals, and his recent presentation of these ideas in a popular online course, The Age of Sustainable Development is a landmark publication and clarion call for all who care about our planet and global justice.

At the turn of the millennium, the unanimous adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the United Nations General Assembly marked a new chapter in international development. However, voices from the Global South were noticeably absent in shaping the agenda. Fifteen years later, the global context has changed so much that it would have been inconceivable not to have taken voices from the South into account when planning the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since its inception in 2012, the Southern Voice on Post-MDG International Development Goals (Southern Voice), a network of 48 think tanks from Africa, Asia and Latin America, has generated a substantial body of original research to feed into various aspects of the post-2015 development agenda, such as the missing dimensions of the MDGs, ways to mitigate existing challenges in delivering on aspired outcomes, and new issues, goals, targets and indicators that are crucial for the next global development framework. Southern Perspectives on the Post-2015 International Development Agenda consolidates this research and stitches together development realities and policy experiences from the Global South, infusing unique local perspectives to the global debate on the post-2015 agenda. The compendium addresses the overarching themes underpinning the new international development framework by focusing on issues such as sustainability and growth, inclusion and social policies, governance and capacities, and financing of the new agenda. Southern Voice seeks to challenge the "knowledge asymmetry" afflicting the global knowledge system by channelling evidence-based policy analyses produced by centres of excellence, located in the Global South. This is a valuable resource for academics and researchers, policymakers and practitioners, and concerned students in search of alternative views on sustainable development.

This edited collection draws upon interdisciplinary research to explore new dimensions in the politics of image and aid. While development communication and public diplomacy are established research fields, there is little scholarship that seeks to understand how the two areas relate to one another. However, international development doctrine in the US, UK and elsewhere increasingly suggests that they are integrated–or at the very least should be–at the level of national strategy. This timely volume considers a variety of cases in diverse regions, drawing upon a combination of theoretical and conceptual lenses that combine a focus on both aid and image. The result is a text that seeks to establish a new body of knowledge on how contemporary debates into public diplomacy, soft power and the national image are fundamentally changing not just the communication of aid, but its wider strategies, modalities and practices.