Comment & Opinion - Columnists Archives

26 March 2018
Sometime this summer, residents of Cape Town, South Africa, are expecting ‘Day Zero’ – the day when almost all the taps in the city will run dry. On that day, its 4 million…
26 March 2018
Plastics in the world’s oceans are set to treble in the next ten years, according to a new UK government report. They are also contributing to a rubbish…
22 March 2018
We are often told that there is no place for politics in objective research. The scientific tradition has built rigorous methodologies to get rid of bias, and presents itself as…
22 March 2018
Populists’ aversion to institutional restraints extends to the economy, where they oppose obstacles placed in their way by autonomous regulatory agencies, independent central…
21 March 2018
The scandal that has erupted around Cambridge Analytica’s alleged harvesting of 50m Facebook profiles assembled from data provided by a UK-based academic and his company…
21 March 2018
It’s time to build a new worldview around a deeper sense of connectedness. What do all these ideas have in common—a tax on carbon, big investments in renewable energy, a livable…
20 March 2018
Olu Fasan analyses why economic partnership agreements could be the key to helping African countries achieve their goal of industrialisation. For nearly three decades, Europe’s…
19 March 2018
Antoine Martin explores the increasingly complex relationships between cryptocurrencies and states. Looking at cryptocurrency and blockchain news this week got me thinking…
19 March 2018
Dan Banik argues that the development community must embrace the complexity of measuring success in the difficult places they work.  The history of international…
14 March 2018
Erik Brattberg argues that Trump’s trade policies threaten to undermine America’s global leadership role.  By imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, President Donald…