On 20 November 2009, the global community celebrates the 20th anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the unique document that sets international standards for the care, treatment and protection of all individuals below age 18. To celebrate this landmark, the United Nations Children's Fund is dedicating a special edition of its flagship report The State of the World's Children to examining the Convention's evolution, progress achieved on child rights, challenges remaining, and actions to be taken to ensure that its promise becomes a reality for all children.

This book raises critical questions about the explanatory framework guiding sports coaching research and presents a new conceptualization for research in the field. Through mapping and contextualizing sports coaching research within a corporatized higher education, the dominant or legitimate forms of sports coaching knowledge are problematized and a new vision of the field, which is socially and culturally responsive, communitarian and justice-oriented emerges.

DFID is right to focus more resources on fragile states if global poverty reduction goals are to be met. However, this report highlights a number of concerns about DFID's capacity to meet this and other new policy directions set out in the 2009 White Paper (Cm. 7656, ISBN 9780101765626), based on analysis of the Department's performance in 2008-09 (the Department's annual report 2008-09 published as HC 867-I,II, ISBN 9780102962154). Climate change, another key White Paper focus area, threatens progress on poverty reduction and will hit the poorest people first and hardest. The outcome of the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009 was disappointing and real progress needs to be made before the next conference at the end of this year. The White Paper also indicates that DFID will channel more funding through multilateral organisations including the EU, the UN and the World Bank. This offers the prospect of more coordinated delivery of aid, but only if these bodies increase their effectiveness and their poverty focus. The report also argues for speedier reform of the governance of the international financial institutions. The recession has had a significant impact on developing countries. It is estimated that an additional 90 million people will be affected by poverty as a combined result of the global food, financial and fuel crises over the last few years. Donors, including the UK, have responded and have sought to identify specific needs in developing countries, though many donors are failing to meet the aid commitments they have already made.