WEEK 13
GLOBAL DEMOGRAPHY
Shanghai Will Allow Only 800K More to Live
There Chinese city will cap its permanent
population at 25M
By John Johnson, Newser Staff
Posted Dec 26, 2017 8:03 AM CST
(Newser) 3 Anyone interested in moving to
Shanghai better not dawdle. The Chinese
economic hub currently has a population of
24.2 million, and authorities just put a plan in
place to cap the permanent population at 25
million, reports Reuters. The idea behind the
newly adopted master plan through 2035 is
to curb the maladies common to major cities
such as environmental pollution, gridlock traffic,
and a decline 122 Understanding and
Appreciating the Contemporary World in the
quality of public services such as medical
care and education. The State Council, which
refers to all of the above as "big city disease,"
also will limit the amount of land made
available for development in the coming years.
A research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of
Social Sciences predicts that the poor will bear
the brunt of the new population limit the
most because the government will begin
tearing down cheap housing now in existence,
per the Global Times. Imposing such a limit,
he warns, is "unpractical and against the
social development trend." China similarly
hopes to cap the population of Beijing at 23
million by 2020, notes the Guardian.
Already, plans were in the works to move
government offices out of Beijing to a new city
being built about 50 miles to the south.
ADVANCING
The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries
of Fundamental Change
By Ronald Lee
Before the start of the demographic
transition, life was short, births were many,
growth was slow and the population was
young. During the transition, Ž mortality and
then fertility declined, causing population
growth rates first to accelerate and then to slow
again, moving toward low fertility, long life and
an old population. The transition began around
1800 with declining mortality in Europe. It has
now spread to all parts of the world and is
projected to be completed by 2100. This
global demographic transition has brought
momentous changes, reshaping the economic
and demographic life cycles of individuals and
restructuring populations. Since 1800, global
population size has already increased by a
factor of six and by 2100 will have risen by a
factor of ten. There will then be 50 times as
many elderly, but only five times as many
children; thus, the ratio of elders to children will
have risen by a factor of ten. The length of life,
which has already more than doubled, will have
tripled, while births per woman will have
dropped from six to two. In 1800, women spent
about 70 percent of their adult years bearing
and rearing young children, but that fraction
has decreased in many parts of the world to
only about 14 percent, due to lower fertility and
longer life.
MORTALITY DECLINES
✓ The worlds demographic transition started
in northwest Europe, where mortality began a
secular decline around 1800. ✓ The first stage
of mortality decline is due to reductions in
contagious and infectious diseases by air or
water.
✓ Preventive medicine, small pox vaccine,
played significantly in the mortality decline in
the eighteenth century. ✓ Improved personal
hygiene also helped as income rose.
✓ The gem theory of diseases became more
widely known and accepted.
✓ Another major factor in the early phases
of growing life expectancy is improvement in
nutrition.
✓ Famine mortality was reduced by
improvements in storage and transportation
Secular increases in incomes led to improved
nutrition in childhood and throughout life ✓
Life expectancy is positively associated with
height in the industrial country populations
(Fogel, 1994; Barker, 1992.) ✓ In recent
decades, the continuing reduction in mortality is
due to reductions in chronic and degenerative
diseases, notably heart disease and cancer
(Riley, 2001).
✓ In the later part of the century, publicly
organized and funded biomedical research has
played an increasingly important part, and the
human genome project and stem cell research
promise future gains.
✓ In India, life expectancy rose from around 24
years in 1920 to 62 years today, a gain of .48
years per calendar year over 80 years. In China,
life expectancy rose from 41 in 195031955 to 70
in 199531999, a gain of .65 years per year over
45 years.
✓ On the optimistic side, Oeppen and Vaupel
(2002) offer a remarkable graph that plots the
highest national female life expectancy
attained for each calendar year from 1840 to
2000.
✓ The points fall close to a straight line,
starting at 45 years in Sweden and ending at
85 years in Japan, with a slope of 2.4 years per
decade. If we boldly extend the line forward in
time, it reaches 97.5 years by mid-century and
109 years by 2100.
✓ Less optimistic projections are based on
extrapolation of trends in age-specific death
rates over the past 50 or 100 years. This
approach implies more modest gains for the
high-income nations of the world, with average
life expectancy approaching 90 years by the end
of the twenty- first century (Lee and Carter,
1992; Tuljapurkar, Li and Boe, 2000).
FERTILITY TRANSITION
✓ Between 1890 and 1920, marital fertility
began to decline in most European provinces,
with a median decline of about 40 percent
from 1870 to 1930 (Coale and Treadway,
1986, p. 44).
✓ Most economic theories of fertility start with
the idea that couples wish to have a certain
number of surviving children, rather than births
per se.
✓ Some of the improvement in child
survival is itself a response to parental
decisions to invest more in the health and
welfare of a smaller number of children
(Nerlove, 1974).
✓ These issues of parental investment in
children suggest that fertility will also be in•
influenced by how economic change
influences the costs and benefits of
childbearing.
✓ Bearing and rearing children is time
intensive.
✓ Technological progress and increasing
physical and human capital make labor more
productive, raising the value of time in all
activities, which makes children increasingly
costly relative to consumption goods.
✓ Since women have had primary
responsibility for childbearing and rearing,
variations in the productivity of women have
been particularly important.
✓ Rising incomes have shifted consumption
demand toward nonagricultural goods and
services, for which educated labor is a more
important input.
✓ Overall, these patterns have several
effects: children become more expensive,
their economic contributions are diminished
by school time and educated parents have
higher value of time, which raises the
opportunity costs of childrearing.
✓ Furthermore, parents with higher incomes
choose to devote more resources to each
child, and since this raises the cost of each
child, it also leads to fewer children (Becker,
1981; Willis, 1974, 1994).
POPULATION GROWTH
✓ The combination of fertility and mortality
determines population growth.
✓ Between 1950 and 2050, the actual and
projected trajectories for the More, Less and
Least Developed Countries are plotted.
✓ One is a trajectory for Europe from 1800
to 1950. The end point of this trajectory in
1950 is quite close to the start point for
the more developed countries.
✓ The starting points of these demographic
paths differ somewhat.
✓ India had higher initial fertility and
mortality than Europe, as did the Least
Developed Countries relative to the Less
Developed Countries in 1950, which in turn had
far higher mortality and fertility than the More
Developed Countries in that year.
✓ Except for India, the starting points all
indicate moderate (for Europe) to rapid (for
Least and Less Developed Countries) population
growth.
✓ There has been rapid global convergence
in fertility and mortality among nations over
the past 50 years, although important
differences remain.
✓ This convergence of fertility and mortality is
in marked contrast to per capita GDP, which
has tended to diverge between high-income
and low-income countries during this time.
✓ Today, the median individual lives in a
country with a total fertility rate of 2.34barely
above the 2.1 fertility rate of the United
States and a median life expectancy at birth of
68 years compared to 77 years for the United
States (Wilson, 2001).
SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC
TRANSITION
The three centuries of demographic transition
from 1800 to 2100 will reshape the world9s
population in a number of ways. The obvious
changes are the rise in total population from 1
billion in 1800 to perhaps 9.5 billion in
21004although this long-term estimate is highly
uncertain due largely to uncertainty about
future fertility. The average length of life
increases by a factor of two or three, and the
median age of the population doubled from the
low 20s to the low 40s. Many More Developed
Countries already have negative population
growth rates, and the United Nations projects
that the population of Europe will decline by 13
percent between now and 2050. But many
other changes will also be set in motion in
family structure, health, institutions for saving
and supporting retirement and even in
international • flows of people and capital.
At the level of families, the number of
children born declines sharply and
childbearing becomes concentrated into a
few years of a woman9s life. When this
change is combined with greater longevity,
many more adult years become available for
other activities. The joint survivorship of
couples is greatly increased, and kin
networks become more intergenerationally
dense, while horizontally sparser. These
changes appear to be quite universal so far.
However, whether childbearing is
concentrated at younger ages or at older ages
and whether age at marriage rises or falls seems
to vary from setting to setting, and patterns are
still changing even in the populations farthest
along in the transition. Parents with fewer
children are able to invest more in each child,
reflecting the quality-quantity tradeoff, which
may also be one of the reasons parents reduced
their fertility (Becker, 1981; Willis, 1974).
WEEK 14
GLOBAL MIGRATION
DEFINITIONS AND TYPES:
• Migration means crossing the boundary of a
political or administrative unit for a certain
minimum period (Boyle et al. 1998).
• Internal migration is the movement of people
from one area like a province, a district, or
municipality to another within one country.
• International migration is the crossing the
frontiers which separate one of the world9s
approximately 200 states from another.
Many scholars argue that internal and
international migration are part of the same
process; they should be analyzed together
(Skeldon 1997).
• The great majority of border crossings do not
imply migration: most travelers are tourists or
business visitors who have no intention of
staying in the country for good.
• International migration arises in a world
divided up into nation-states, in which
remaining in the country of birth is still seen as
norm and moving to another country as a
deviation.
• Migration tends to be regarded as
problematic. It has to be controlled and
curbed, for it may bring unpredictable changes.
International migrants are divided into:
• Temporary labor migrants- who migrate for a
limited period of time in order to work and send
remittances to families in the country of origin.
• Highly-skilled and business migrants-
people with qualifications such as the
managers, executives, professionals,
technicians, and the like, who move within the
internal labor markets of transnational
corporations and international organizations.
• Irregular migrants- also known as the
undocumented or illegal migrants. They enter
the country in search for employment with
no necessary documents and permits.
• Refugees - those who are unable or
unwilling to return to their country because
of a 8well-founded fear or persecution on
account of race, religion, nationality,
membership in a particular social group or
political opinion.
• Asylum seekers - those who move across
borders in search of protection.
• Forced migration - in a broader sense, this
includes not only refugees and asylum
seekers but also people forced to move by
environmental catastrophes or development
projects like new factories, roads or dams.
• Family members- also known as family
reunion or family reunification migrants.
• Return migrants- those who return to their
countries of origin after a period in another
country.
CAUSE OF MIGRATION
✓ Disparity in levels of income
✓ Employment
✓ Social well-being
✓ Differences in demographic patterns with
regard to fertility, mortality, age-structure,
and labor-force growth
✓ According to neo-classical economic theory,
the main cause of migration is individuals
efforts to maximize their income by moving
from low-wage to high-wage economies
✓ Migration decisions are made not just by
individuals- they often represent family
strategies to maximize income and survival
chances (Hugo, 1994).
THE VOLUME OF CONTEMPORARY MIGRATION
• The United Nations figures show that the
global migrant stock (the number of people
resident in a place outside their country of
birth) grew from 75 million in 1965 to 120
million in 1990.
• The 1990 figure was roughly equal to 2% of
the worlds population.
• The number of migrants grew slightly faster
than world population as a whole, but the
annual growth rate of 1.9% for the whole
period increasing to 2.6% from 1985-1990 was
n not dramatic.
• International migrants remain a fairly small
minority.
• Internal migration, conversely, is much larger,
• For instance the number of internal migrants
in India in 1981 was some 200 million, more
than double the number of international
migrants in the whole world at that time.
• The significance of migration as a major
factor in societal change lies in the fact that it is
concentrated in certain countries and regions.
• Migration affects certain areas within both
the sending and the receiving countries more
than others.
• Migration needs to take place in an orderly
way to safeguard the human rights of migrants.
WEEK 15
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
CONFIGURING
Goal 1: End Poverty
Goal 2: End Hunger
Goal 3: Well-being
Goal 4: Quality Education
Goal 5: Gender Equality
Goal 6: Water and Sanitation for all
Goal 7: Affordable and sustainable energy
Goal 8: Decent work for all
Goal 9: Technology to benefit all
Goal 10: Reduce Inequality
Goal 11: Safe cities and communities
Goal 12: Responsible consumption by all
Goal 13: Stop climate change
Goal 14: Protect the ocean
Goal 15: Take care of the earth
Goal 16: Live in peace
Goal 17: Mechanisms and partnerships to reach
the goals
ADVANCING
Sustainable Economic Systems
There was a strong impression that the global
economy became the sphere of extreme
uncertainty and risk during the first decade of
the twenty-first century. It can be recalled that
there was a dimension of crisis that began in
2007. It was not like another business cycle
setback. It was a serious breakdown that
challenged the foundations of modern
approaches to the creation of welfare.
Collapsing financial markets, rising
unemployment, deeper inequalities, a
shrinking middle class, extreme indebtedness,
and inability of governments to force through
reforms were just some of the symptoms of
crisis around the globe. Moreover, the
challenges of climate change and the
unavailability of resources that were important
in the development of technologies to keep
the economy growing continued to surface.
Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist, has predicted
these things to happen years back, and has
coined the term, "risk society" (Beck, 1986).
STABILITY
• Firmness in position, permanence and
resistance to change are the words
associated with stability.
• The International Monetary Fund, 2012
defines it as 8avoiding large swings in economic
activity, high inflation, and excessive volatility
in exchange rates and financial markets.
• This refers to indexes that describe the
economy in short term categories.
• Knoop (2009) expressed that within a few
years, every economy moves through periods
of rapid growth with rising demand, higher
inflation and dropping unemployment,
followed by depression with reversal
phenomena.
• Excessive highs and lows should be avoided.
• There was a Great Depression that
happened in 1929, when the economy
collapsed in a dramatic way after long years
of post-war prosperity and overproduction.
• The global crisis in the 1970s opened the
gates of new economic ideas.
• Monetarism, which is premised on the
idea that stabilization could be produced
control of amount of money in circulation.
• Milton Friedman started to dominate global
capitalism.
• Global capitalism fitted well with neo-
liberalism, which expanded with the free
market reforms of Ronald Reagan in the USA
and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.
• The 1990s still experienced world economy
collapses such as the Asian financial crisis in
1998, the Russian crisis followed by the
disaster in Argentina that started in 1999.
• These crises were mainly attributed to major
political mistakes, but particularly alarming with
their contagion effects.
• Since 2007, many countries had been trying
to restore stabilization.
SUSTAINABILITY
• It considers the long-term capacities of a
system to exist, not its short term resistance
to change
• Bruntland Report (World Commission on
Environment and Development, 1987) said
that 8development that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own
needs9 deserves the label of sustainability.
• Technology became a fantastic escape from
the sustainability dilemma.
• The Solow-Swan model from the 1950s saw
the only chance for innovations.
• A sheer increase of the amount of
resources added to input could lead to
diminishing marginal returns only.
• New ideas in technology and organization
made it possible to overtake the steady state
of zero growth and induce development
without increasing resources.
• Paul Romer and Robert Lucas in 1980s
proposed a new theory called, the New
Growth Theory.
• The endogenous factors like human capital
and education were recognized as crucial for
growth and their application was free from the
steady state of classical resources.
• In the 19th century, the issue of
sustainability considered mainly social
conditions in early industrial capitalism.
• Modern debate on sustainability focused
mainly on environmental questions.
• In 1968, Garret Hardin wrote the famous
book, Tragedy of Commons that analyzed
how public goods got exhausted by actors in a
free market economy (Hardin, 1968).
• The Club of Rome published, The Limits to
Growth that dealt with the connection
between economic growth and the scarcity of
resources.
• Rising awareness of the sustainability
problem in environmental issues and
resources translated also into international
cooperation.
• Sustainability perspectives started to be
visible not only in the environmental area but
also on the theme of overpopulation.
WEEK 16
GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY
New Hope against Hunger: These 'Super Beans'
Early signs of success in Africa
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Dec 3, 2017 3:10 PM CST
(NEWSER) 3 The so-called "super bean," a fast-
maturing, high-yield variety, is being promoted
by Uganda's government and agriculture
experts amid efforts to feed hunger-prone
parts of Africa, the AP reports. It's also a step
toward the next goal: the "super, super bean"
that researchers hope can be created through
genetic editing. The beans are thrilling farmers
in an impoverished part of northern Uganda
that also strains under the recent arrival of
more than 1 million refugees from its war-
torn neighbor, South Sudan. The International
Center for Tropical Agriculture says the beans
have been bred by conventional means to
resist the drought conditions that can lead to
starvation as arable land disappears.
The group operates one of just two bean
"gene banks" in Africa, which is expected to
be hit hardest by climate change even though
the continent produces less than 4% of the
world's greenhouse gases, according to the
UN Development Program. Beans kept at the
two banks are sent to partners in 30 countries
across the continent to be developed further so
they can cope with local conditions. The Uganda
bank stores around 4,000 types of beans,
including some sourced from neighboring
Rwanda before its 1994 genocide killed around
800,000 people and wiped out many of the
country's bean varieties. Aid workers hope
the beans will encourage the refugees to
grow their own food rather than rely on
handouts, which in some cases have been cut
because of funding shortages.
ADVANCING
The Challenge of Feeding the World
Global food security has become one of the
challenges of the 21st century. The increase
of global food prices has caught the
attention of all governments worldwide. The
vulnerability of food systems to a number of
demographic, socio-economic, environmental
and policy-related factors was also among the
concerns of the globe. The detrimental
impacts of high food prices and food and
agriculture-related policies affected the poor
and marginalized communities, specifically in
the developing countries.
The upheavals in local food systems have an
influence on the regional and global food
security concerns. Conversely, the
developments at the global level often have the
power to penetrate deep within the regions and
states to cause high levels of insecurity. These
developments may also have diverse and
far-reaching consequences for the security and
over-all well-being of communities across
borders.
An Evolving Concept of Food Security
✓ Food security is used widely across
disciplines and issue areas.
✓ The prevalence of food insecurity is
manifested by the presence of hunger and
malnourishment.
✓ Food security is associated with the
availability of food at the local, national and
global levels (McDonald, 2010).
✓ 1974 UN World Food Conference defined
food security as the 8availability at all times of
adequate world food supplies of basic
foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of
food consumption and to offset fluctuations in
production and prices9 (FAQ, 2003: 27).
✓ Maxwell (1996) mentioned that in
subsequent decades, three distinct paradigm
shifts took place to significantly influence the
food security discourse and international
agenda.
✓ First paradigm shift was through the late
19709s and early 19809s in which the academic
and policy discourse on food security witnessed
a shift away from the rather limiting focus on
food availability and supply as the core
concerns of food security.
✓ The second paradigm shift highlighted the
importance of livelihood security as a key
household priority and component of food
security, shaping decisions around whether or
not to go hungry in the short term.
✓ The third shift indicates a move away from a
purely calorie-counting approach to food
security, to one that incorporates subjective
measures of what it means to be food-secure,
including access to food that is preferable
(Maxwell, 1988,1996:158-60.)
✓ Food security exists when all people, at all
times, have physical, social, and economic
access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food
that meets their dietary needs and food
preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO,
2002).
Global Food Security- Key Trends
A. Rising Food Prices and Poverty
• In the mid 20009s, global food prices began to
climb.
• The prices of key staples such as wheat, rice,
maize, and soy bean as well as edible oils all
soared.
• Civil unrest in the forms of protests and riots
in numerous countries around the world
happened.
• The impact of food prices spikes has been
most devastating to those who are in the
poverty level.
• The global food price crisis in 2007-2008 may
have forced as many as 100 million people
deeper into poverty.
• The global food price spike in 2010-2011
may have consigned an additional 44 million
around the globe to a life of poverty and
food insecurity (Rastello and Pugh, 2011).
• There are several reasons that have been
debated over the global food price spikes.
One of those is the on-going world
population growth.
• The growth of the world population is
proportionate to the demand for food and
rising incomes and growing per capita food
consumption.
• The rising cost of fuel and agricultural
inputs like fertilizers and pesticides; in
developing countries, declining or stagnating
agricultural yield growth rates in the context
of the poor; adverse weather events such as
droughts and floods; the knee-jerk
government export bans in the face of food
shortage, and the financial speculation in
agricultural commodities could have also been
the reasons of global food prices spikes on the
supply side.
B. Population Growth and Urbanization
• By mid-century, the world9s total
population is set to reach over 9 billion,
doubling the demand for food, feed, and fiber
(FAO, 2009).
• The increase of demands for food comes
from developing countries in Asia and Africa.
• India and China, for example, are the fastest
growing countries in the Asian region.
• The demographic trends in Asia have
serious implications for food systems in the
region and elsewhere.
• As the youth move from rural areas to urban
areas to look for better livelihoods, there are
fewer people of working age left behind to
produce the growing quantities of food
required to meet rising demand in urban
areas.
• The mass movement of people from rural
to urban areas has also been accompanied
by a rapid and ongoing expansion of cities
and slums in parts of Asia.
• By 2030, urban populations and the number
of slum dwellers in Africa and Asia are set to
double.
• Slums are characterized by lack of access
to clean drinking water, inadequate sanitation
and waste disposal mechanism, making
resident population highly vulnerable to quick-
spreading diseases and chronic food insecurity
(CISS, 2013).
C. Rising Incomes and Changing Diets
• As incomes in developing countries continue
to grow, more and more people are able to
access food in greater quantities. 155
Understanding and Appreciating the
Contemporary World
• Initial increases in food consumption may
pertain to the intake of higher quantities of
key staples- cereals.
• There is a substitution phase in which the
cereals are replaced by more energy-rich
foods such as meat and those with a high
concentration of vegetable oils and sugar
(Godfrey et al., 2010: 2770)
• Global consumption of meat increased by
around 62 per cent between 1963 and 2005.
• The consumption of meat in the developing
countries grew threefold during this period.
• Much of the growth of meat consumption
took place in Asia in general and in China in
particular (Kearney, 2010:2796).
• However, not all developing countries
have experienced this phenomenon of
nutrition transition equally.
• In India, for example, the consumption of
meat continues to lag behind when
compared to Brazil and China for people at
similar income levels.
• The overall demand for grains for direct
and indirect consumption through animal
products continues to expand.
• In China, the increasing conversion of land
for intensive mono-cropping of soybeans and
maize for animal feed over the decades had
caused immense pollution of waterways by
pesticides and 156 Understanding and
Appreciating the Contemporary World
fertilizers, declines in biodiversity, the
destruction of natural carbon sinks and rising
greenhouse gas emissions (Schneider, 2011).

D. Bio-fuel Production, Land Use Change and
Access to Land
• The global surge in bio-fuel production was
triggered in 2004-2005.
• It happened when the United States and the
European Union adopted a number of policies
and incentives to boost bio-fuel consumption
(USAID, 2009).
• Biofuels are seen to be significant in
reducing dependence o fossil fuels in a
number of countries around the globe.
• Biofuel production 3and policies that
encourage and support it- has become highly
controversial in the context of global food
security.
• First generation biofuels are produced from
plant starch, oils, animal fats and sugars.
• Bio-ethanol, for example, is produced from
food crops such as sugarcane, maize, wheat,
sugar beets and sweet sorghum, and is
currently the most widely used form of biofuel.
• The United States and Brazil are the
world9s largest bioethanol producing
countries.
• Largest quantities of biodiesel, which is made
from edible oils, come from Germany, France,
United States, and Italy (Naylor et at., 2007).
• Jean Ziegler (2007:2), the UN special
Rapporteur on the right to food, stated that the
sudden, ill-conceived, rush to convert food into
fuels is a recipe for disaster.
• The IMF highlighted that biofuels were
responsible for almost half the increase in the
total consumption of key food crops in 2006-
2007.
• In Asia, a large number of small farmers in
countries like Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines,
Bangladesh, and Nepal continue to suffer from
weak access to land and tenure insecurity,
in the wider context of weak governance
institutions, poor law enforcement, and
endemic corruption.
E. Climate Change
• Climate change affects all four dimensions
of food security: food availability, food
accessibility, food utilization, and food
systems stability.
• Agriculture is highly-sensitive to climate,
and food production is affected directly by
variations in agro-ecological conditions for
growing crops (Devereux and Maxwell, 2001;
Fischer et al., 2002; Kurukulasuriya and
Rosenthal, 2003; Schmidhuber and Tubiello,
2007).
• Overall studies show that the impacts of
climate change will be mixed and uneven across
regions (IPCC, 2007).
• In the next four decades or so, average global
temperature will rise by 2-3 degrees Celsius
(Stern, 2006:56).
• For countries located at lower latitudes,
the IPCC warns that the productivity of major
crops like rice, wheat, and maize, is projected to
drop with even small increases in local average
temperature. This is particularly the case for
countries that are located in seasonally dry
and tropical regions.
• Climate change will bring the developing
countries 8high costs and few benefits9
(Stern, 2006:vii).
• Low income developing countries tend to lack
adequate infrastructure for health care, and
large chunks of the population often do not
have access to basic amenities such as clean
drinking water and sanitation.
• Both sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia,
with the highest levels of hunger and
malnourishment worldwide, are set to suffer
from the negative impacts of climate change on
crop production.
WEEK 17
GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP
CONFIGURING The UK Commits to Safer
Schools,
Urged by the Actions of Global Citizens and
Partners
This is vital news at a time of escalating conflict
By Katie Dallas
Published April 20, 2018
In a week of military action in Syria that is
drawing global attention, it is important to
remember the innocent human lives 4
including the many children 4 that suffer
during conflict. An often-overlooked
consequence during these periods is the impact
on education, despite how critical learning is
for children to rebuild their war-torn
communities.
More than a third of Syrian schools have
been destroyed or damaged by fighting
leaving nearly 2 million children out of the
classroom. And another 600,000 who have fled
their homes are not in school. The story is much
the same with rising conflict across the globe
4 246 million children experience some kind
of school violence in the world today.
Thus it came as very welcome news on
Thursday that the UK became the 74th
signatory to the Safe Schools Declaration 4 a
commitment that serves as an official
assurance that the UK will condemn attacks
on schools, protect education during armed
conflict, and offer supervision, services and
teaching to save childrens lives.
Just 48 hours before, at the <Girls in
Emergencies= reception co-hosted by Global
Citizen and Coalition for Global Prosperity,
Global Citizen and our partners at Send My
Friend to School had performed a petition
handover to the UK Foreign Secretary, Boris
Johnson, at the event. The petition
contained the signatures of 25,549 people and
children from 932 schools who want the UK to
sign this declaration to make schools around
the world safe. At the event, Johnson had
indicated that the declaration would be signed
"very soon."
This vital commitment is thanks to your actions
and the tireless campaign led by our partners 4
among them: Send My Friend to School, the
Global Coalition to Protect Schools from Attack,
Save the Children, Results UK, Plan UK, Human
Rights Watch, Global Citizen and the Malala
Fund. For the past four years these
organizations have been urging the UK
government to join 73 other countries,
including Canada, France and New Zealand, as
signatories to the Declaration. The importance
of a commitment like this should not be
underestimated. In Afghanistan, where at least
40 schools were attacked in 2016, the Education
Ministry is using the declaration to push for the
removal of military checkpoints and bases from
schools, with other big steps also taken in
Central African Republic, Nigeria, Somalia and
the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Of course, Global Citizen and partners will be
watching closely to see that the UK government
stands by this commitment and takes concrete
steps to make it less likely that students,
teachers, schools and universities will be
attacked in coming months. And we invite
other Commonwealth countries, like
Australia, Malawi and Bangladesh, and G7
leaders like Japan and the United States to
sign up to the Declaration to help every child
stay safe in their place of learning.
ADVANCING
Acting as Global Citizens
• The world citizen was typically an intellectual,
who travelled widely, met and corresponded
with intellectuals in many countries and
advanced cosmopolitan views.
• Since 1945, the global citizen is usually
pictured as the activist on transnational social
movements.
• The idea that travelling is an expression of
cosmopolitanism is indeed debatable.
• Mass tourism, which often shields people
from the society they are visiting, has nothing
to do with increasing international
understanding and may hay harmful effects on
the environment and local culture.
• However, there are travels that are seen as
means of promoting international
understanding like exchanges between
schoolchildren,
• The image of wandering scholar is still
part of a cosmopolitan view of the world of
learning.
• It is also encouraged by governments to
promote friendly relations between countries.
• In the beginning of the 21st century, there
was the development of informal networks
and formal transnational organizations.
• These organizations pursue professional or
social interests that have become an important
feature of international politics.
• The existence of these organizations can be
interpreted as the creation of civil global
society.
• The existence of transnational associations
does not necessarily mean that those involved
are acting as global citizens because in many
cases, they are basically promoting their own
particular concerns.
• Those who belong to these organizations
meet in international conferences to share their
ideas and to call for states and international law
to respect their rights to copyright and to an
income from their writing.
• Campaigning to transnational organizations is
committed to global causes.
• The number and importance of voluntary
bodies opposing oppression, or expressing
practical solidarity with those suffering in other
parts of the world also grew significantly in the
20th century.
• Many people around the world are making
links across national frontiers to demonstrate
support for cosmopolitan ideals.
• Transnational organizations like Amnesty
International, Oxfam, and Greenpeace cite
discussions on global citizenship.
• Transnational movements usually involve
political lobbying and protest.
• Sometimes, they encompass more extreme
form of resistance.
• They also depend on volunteers who offer
direct assistance to those who are suffering
from abuse, poverty, war, among others.
Global Civil Society
• The concept of civil society has become
central to social theory since the 19809s
when dissident intellectuals in Eastern
Europe looked to social networks initiated
from below to provide a sphere of
independence from the state and a basis for
resistance.
• The existence of autonomous social groups
and institutions has been seen as essential to
democratization both in remaining
communist regimes such as China and in other
authoritarian states.
• Democratic theorists have argued that civil
society is essential to liberal democracies as a
barrier to an encroaching state
• Participation in voluntary bodies provides a
political education and promotes responsible
citizenship.
• Hegel and Marx conceptualized civil
society as the sphere defined by the market
economy, and its resulting individualism and
socially divisive effects.
Campaigning for human rights: Cosmopolitan
principles and international law
• The basic tenet of cosmopolitanism is the
belief in universal equality and human rights.
• Transnational organizations supporting
human rights are often cited in discussion of
both global society and global citizenship.
• Richard Falk discussed how global civil society
promotes a world order based not on state
interests but on the interests and rights of
human beings.
• Amnesty International and regional human
rights bodies typify this move towards 8a law
of humanity.
• Amnesty International is probably the best-
known human rights campaigning organization
with a separate international secretariat and
sections in many parts of the world.
• It is used to exemplify transnational action to
protect individual rights.
• Amnesty has also played a role in
strengthening global civil society.

• But most theorists of civil society see it as • It can also be seen as a collective global
distinct from both the state and the economy. citizen.

• Civil society also suggests very informal links • Human Rights Watch, which is based in the
3 whether between neighbors or fellow USA, is one of those who play important role in
enthusiasts of a particular hobby. monitoring human rights worldwide and
protesting about abuses.
• The implication of global civil society must
depend on how it is defined and on the
comparative economic and political power of
groups within it.

• Global civil society poses a direct challenge to

states when groups within one country ignore
or oppose official policies to create links with
citizens in other countries.