April 12, 2022 | Online Virtual Event | The University of British Colombia 9:00 a.m. – 6:30 p.m. PST
IT HAS BEEN CLEAR FOR DECADES THAT THE EARTH’S CLIMATE IS CHANGING, AND THE ROLE OF HUMAN INFLUENCE ON THE CLIMATE SYSTEM IS UNDISPUTED – VALÉRIE MASSON-DELMOTTE, IPCC WORKING GROUP I CO-CHAIR, 2021-08-09.\\
There is no reasonable doubt that the collectivity of individual human decisions has substantially changed the global climate, and on its current trajectory, the rate of change is accelerating. The impacts of this change are being seen around the world as wildfires, heat waves, torrential rains and powerful storms. The more heat-trapping gasses are added to the atmosphere, the further the climate will change and the greater the risk that the climate system tips into a new and substantially different state. A state that will seriously disrupt all ecological systems – within which human systems are embedded – on the planet.
Each of us has a range of choices available that have differing impacts on other people and the global environment. Should that range of choices be constrained for some so that the global climate system can be stabilized? Whose choices? How? What, if anything, we do together to change the choices we make as individuals is a “wicked” problem (Churchman, 1967), intersecting various important values with no objectively right solution.
Join us on April 12, 2022, to explore this intersection with our distinguished guests.
This year, Global Financial Integrity, Academics Stand Against Poverty, and Yale’s Global Justice Program will be awarding the ninth annual Amartya Sen Prizes to the two best original essays examining one particular component of illicit financial flows, the resulting harms, and possible avenues of reform. Essays should be about 7,000 to 9,000 words long. There is a first prize of USD 5,000 and a second prize of USD 3,000. Winning essays must be available for publication in Journal Academics Stand Against Poverty.
Illicit financial flows are explicitly recognized as an obstacle to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and singled out as target #4 of SDG 16. They are defined as cross-border movements of funds that are illegally earned, transferred, or used – such as funds earned through illegal trafficking in persons, drugs or weapons; funds illegally transferred through mispriced exchanges (e.g., among affiliates of a multinational firm seeking to shift profits to reduce taxes); goods misinvoiced or funds moved in order to evade taxes; and funds used for corruption of or by public or corporate officials.
Components of illicit financial flows can be delimited by sector or geographically. Delimitation by sector might focus your essay on some specific activity, business or industry – such as art, real estate, health care, technology, entertainment, shipping, weapons, agriculture, sports, gaming, education, politics, tourism, natural resource extraction, banking and financial services – or on an even narrower subsector such as the diamond trade, hunting, insurance, or prostitution. Delimitation by geography might further narrow the essay’s focus to some region, country, or province.
Your essay should describe the problematic activity and evaluate the adverse effects that make it problematic. You should estimate, in quantitative terms if possible, the magnitude of the relevant outflows as well as the damage they do to affected institutions and populations. This might include harm from abuse, exploitation and impoverishment of individuals, harm through subdued economic activity and reduced prosperity, and/or harm through diminished tax revenues that depress public spending.
Your essay should also explain the persistence of the harmful activity in terms of relevant incentives and enabling conditions and, based on your explanation, propose plausible ways to curtail the problem. Such reform efforts might be proposed at diverse levels, including supranational rules and regimes, national rules, corporate policies, professional ethics, individual initiatives, or any combination thereof. The task is to identify who has the responsibility, the capacity and (potentially) the knowledge and motivation to change behavior toward effective curtailment. Special consideration will be given to papers that provide a detailed description of how change may come about in a particular geographical or sectoral context.
We welcome authors from diverse academic disciplines and from outside the academy. Please send your entry by email attachment on or before 31 August 2022 to Tom Cardamone at SenPrize@gfintegrity.org. While your message should identify you, your essay should be stripped of self-identifying references, formatted for blind review.
We are delighted to announce Michal Apollo to ASAP\’s Global Board.
Michal is an Assistant Professor (Adjunct) at the Pedagogical University of Krakow, Institute of Geography, Department of Tourism and Regional Studies, a Fellow of Yale University’s Global Justice Program, New Haven, USA, Visiting Scholar at Hainan University – Arizona State University Joint International Tourism College, Haikou, China, and a Visiting Fellow at Center for Tourism Research, Wakayama University, Japan.
As we take forward plans to develop and modernise our communications strategy across our network. Michal\’s experience will support us to take forward this key strand of our strategy in 2022.
The journal includes work from many good people, especially in the Global South, who have interesting and constructive things to say on poverty.
We hope you will like some of the essays in it and will help the journal find suitable topics and authors, especially from the global South, for future issues.
It features a session with the winners of the Eighth Annual Amartya Sen Essay Prize Competition.
Apart from this, much of this year’s event is devoted to exploring incentives and rewards for creating and delivering innovations. Globalized in 1995 through the TRIPs Agreement, humanity’s dominant mechanism for encouraging innovations involves 20-year product patents, whose monopoly features enable innovators to reap markups or licensing fees from early users. This mechanism leads innovators to ignore the needs specific to poor people, who cannot afford to pay large markups; and it also tends to exclude the poor from marketed innovations that are still under patent. In addition, monopoly patents are insufficiently sensitive to externalities — they under-reward, for example, benefits enjoyed by parties other than an innovation’s buyers and users, resulting in massive underinvestment in R&D of green technologies.
Arguably, these problems can be much alleviated by adding a second reward option. This might be a class of domain-specific supplementary alternative mechanisms featuring fixed annual reward pools to be divided among participating innovations according to the social impact achieved with each. Innovations registered for such impact rewards would have to be sold at or below variable cost. An international Health Impact Fund in the pharmaceutical sector, for instance, would create powerful new incentives to develop remedies against diseases concentrated among the poor, rapidly to provide such remedies with ample care at very low prices, and to deploy them strategically to contain, suppress, and ideally to eradicate the target disease. Analogously, a Green Impact Fund for Technology would create powerful new incentives to develop, and to supply at highly competitive prices, new technologies that avert and reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. By promoting innovations and their diffusion together, impact funds might greatly enlarge the benefits of innovation, especially to the poor, and thereby also its cost-effectiveness.
Brief Program:
11/11 at 9:45-10:00 Introduction to the Conference
11/11 at 10:00-11:00 Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia U Center for Sustainable Development)
11/11 at 11:11-12:50 Panel on human rights and intellectual property rights, Diane Desierto (Notre Dame) with Jorge Contreras (U of Utah College of Law), Lawrence Gostin (Georgetown U Law Center) and Ruth Okediji (Harvard Law School).
11/12 at 9:45-10:50 Awarding of the Amartya Sen Essay Prizes, Tom Cardamone (Global Financial Integrity) with Chia-Yun Po (First Prize; “Myanmar’s Jade: The Intersection of Illicit Financial Flows and Armed Conflicts”), Christopher Ngosa (joint Second Prize; “The gendered impacts of illicit financial flows in developing countries”) and Oluebube Offor (joint Second Prize; “Tales of Terrorism Financing in Nigeria: A Panoramic Account of its Root Causes, Consequential Impacts and Possible Reforms”).
11/12 at 11:00-12:30 Panel on the economics of innovation incentives, Aidan Hollis (U of Calgary) with Panos Kanavos (London School of Economics), Margaret Kyle (MINES ParisTech Center for Industrial Economics) and David Popp (Syracuse U).
11/13 at 9:00-10:50 Panel on Indian perspectives on innovation incentives, Sachin Chaturvedi (RIS) with Bhaskar Balakrishnan (RIS), Chandra Bhushan (iFOREST), Sudip Chauduri (CDS), Ashok Madan (IDMA), Leena Menghaney (MSF-India), Yogesh Pai (NLUD-Delhi), R.R. Rashmi (TERI).
11/13 at 11:00-12:50 Panel on African perspectives on green innovation, Bryan P. Galligan (Jesuit Justice and Ecology Network Africa) with Eugene Kabilika (Caritas Zambia), Dennis Kyalo (JENA & Aspen Institute),Emmanuel Nyadzi (Wageningen U) and Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood (U of Saint Andrews).
11/14 at 10:00-11:20
11/14 at 11:30-13:00 Panel on business and finance perspectives on pharmaceutical innovation, Jami Taylor (Protagonist Therapeutics) with Geoff Davis (Sorenson Impact), Nadza Durakovic (Blue Mark), Alice Lin Fabiano (Johnson & Johnson), Aina Fadina (Atento Capital), Gabrielle Gay (Kensington-SV Global), Pradeep Kakkatil (UN Health Innovation Exchange), Joanne Manrique (Center for Global Health and Development), Oliver Niedermaier (Tau Asset Management), Gerhard Pries (Sarona Asset Management) and Chuck Slaughter (TPG Rise).
ASAP is co-organizing a roundtable on Thursday 20th May on the Health Impact Fund: How the pharmaceutical sector can satisfy the needs of the global population:
Fondo de Impacto en la salud. Cómo hacer que el sector farmacéutico satisfaga las necesidades de toda la población
Promoting Resilience, Reducing Vulnerabilities, Strengthening Social Justice 27th – 29th April 2021
ASAP East and Southern Africa (ASAP-ESA) in Conjunction with the Office of the Vice-President in Zambia will be jointly hosting the inaugural Social Justice Conference. The Conference will gather national and international specialists, both academics and policy experts, in order to extend the academics studies concerning the battle against poverty, misery and vulnerabilities in Zambia.
COVID-19 and its Unequal Impacts;
Environment Crisis:
Climate crisis
Food insecurity
\’Building back better in recovery, rehabilitation and reconstructions and strengthening social justice\’
Priority 4 of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction
Recovery from climate shocks in a post-COVID-19 world
Strengthening recovery systems ex-ante, promoting interventions and practices leading to resilient recovery
Social and Economic Vulnerabilities, Universal Safety Net and Basic Income, Right to Development and Sustainable Development Goals (UN).
The Conference aims to strengthen the discourse on recovery in a changing world, with a focus on the growing demand for strengthening recovery systems ex-ante, promoting interventions and practices leading to resilient recovery, and enhancing the global knowledge resources on recovery. The conference will also build capacity for disaster risk reduction in recovery and reconstruction, including discussion and training on tools and methodologies. The Conference will bring together, academics, NGOs and the private sector to share their best practices and lessons on recovery and explore the nexus between resilient recovery efforts and sustainable poverty reduction.
The overall goal of the Conference will be to identify effective and forward looking approaches to achieve resilient post-crisis recovery in which justice, climate and disaster risk reduction, fragility and conflict considerations are mainstreamed.
The conference has the following specific objectives:
Promoting \”building back better\” through recovery as a path to resilience and sustainable development
Making recovery inclusive for greater social justice, equity and equality
Leveraging consensus on recovery as a means to implement Sendai and other global frameworks for development and resilience.
With the announcement of the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy the British Government has set out its vision and its role for the country as a leader globally, it’s goalis ‘to set the long-term strategic aims of our international policy and national security, rooted in our national interests, so that our activity overseas delivers for the British people.’
Whilst Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP)[1] is pleased to see an acknowledged commitment towards conflict prevention and climate change. We feel it is a significant step away from the sustained responsibility and role the UK has to date taken towards international aid in supporting those nations and communities that are in most need.
It is clear that globally we are facing a time of unprecedented change, and the decision to move investments and support to move investments and support to more explicitly tie trade and security to UK interests is a far cry from the historic role the country has taken as a leader in the development sector and, in fact, is set to undermine rather than enhance its position. The UK has to date held a unique position in the global community due to the importance it has always devoted towards aid and the investment in the development of the poorest communities across the globe fully understand the importance of the influence of soft power, particularly in emerging economies. This strategic position is likely to be significantly diminished if support in development is solely focused on this, much narrower lens of focus.
As academics, we have a specific interest in systemic solutions to solve complex structural global challenges and believe that the review, as Bond has noted, should have been an opportunity ‘to understand how many destabilising factors come together, but some of the most foundational elements of a stable global society are poorly addressed’[2]. The work of our network illustrates that sustained investment in levelling out inequalities and long-term investment are far more effective mechanisms to tackle instability. ASAP believes that the move to focus on a shortlist of issues overlook, the often interdependent, nature of issues that perpetuate poverty and will limit the UK Government’s ability to effectively deliver effective sustainable change or impact. ASAP would caution that this connection risks coming at the expense of the social sciences and arts & humanities. Failure to recognise that complex global problems are not just about tech fixes, and losing investment in these sciences fails to understand complex human behaviours that are also required to affect systemic and structural transformations to tackle the world’s greatest problems, such as climate change.
We offer cautious optimism in the renewed commitment to support international collaboration and hope that the UK Government use this opportunity to use its focus not only on opportunities for trade but to explore ways to use effective systemic solutions like our Health Impact Fund to change the playing field to identify sustainable methods to tackle poverty.
It is our hope and request of the British Government to confirm a renewed commitment and investment in the 0.7% of GNI in order to ensure a sustained commitment to work with communities around the world and we hope UK overseas interests are not only positioned to focus on hard science and technology solutions. We would ask that there is a clear statement of support and investment to not only tackle poverty in the most marginalized communities but also to look at systemic long-term solutions that can level up inequality.
About Academics Stand Against Poverty
Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) is an international community of scholars and researchers working to confront the rules and practices that perpetuate global poverty and advocate for targeted, evidence-based reforms. In a “post-truth”, “alternative facts” world, never has our work been more important.
We focus on structural drivers of poverty such as: illicit financial flows and tax havens; imbalanced trade agreements and intellectual property laws economic policies such as austerity and deregulation regulatory capture and lack of democracy in global governance climate change and ecological destruction human rights abuses like trafficking, slavery, forced migration and statelessness,
We seek to make rigorous, cutting-edge research available to journalists and the broader public to shift conventional narratives about the causes of and solutions to poverty, and to encourage citizen engagement.
Global Collaboration
ASAP is a truly global association. With a strong presence among universities and academics in the global South, we focus on creating opportunities for those who face barriers to full participation in global academic dialogue. Our wide network links like-minded professors, students, and researchers from different disciplines around the world to formulate and articulate policy reforms at both national and international levels.
[1] Academics Stand Against Poverty is an international community of scholars and researchers that confront the rules and practices that perpetuate global poverty.
This January, Academics Stand Against Poverty UK (\”ASAP\”) is running a mini-series of events addressing poverty after the pandemic. Join the ASAP UK team for some evenings of lively discussion and debate around some of the biggest issues emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Webinar 1. Addressing Poverty After The Pandemic: Human Rights
The first in the series will explore how the pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have once again highlighted the fragility of human rightswithin the UK and across the globe. Restrictions on travel, contact with family and friends, and increasing economic and health inequality means it is essential that a proactive approach is taken now to implement systematic and lasting change for a fairer and more equal UK in 2021 and the future.
Webinar 2. Addressing Poverty After The Pandemic: Environment
Many of us have seen our relationship with the environment change over the last 12 months. Lockdowns and travel restrictions leading to people spending far more time in their homes and local spaces. But what does this mean for those of us with no access to green space or living in degraded or polluted environments?
Webinar 3. Addressing Poverty After The Pandemic: Challenges and Solutions
Over the last 12 months we have seen a radical change in income and job security in the UK. Not only have we been encouraged to rethink who are “key workers” but many citizens have had to live on 80% income and unable to work for extended periods of time. Labour market disruption, job insecurity and economic recession may be the post pandemic context in which we have to address poverty.
We are a global community of academics dedicated to confronting and transforming rules and practices that perpetuate and aggravate poverty and inequality. At a time of unprecedented challenge and uncertainty, our mission of supporting the most impoverished, marginalised and discriminated, while fighting for a fairer and more just world has never been more critical.
ASAP Global channels its funding through our network of national Chapters who, being at the forefront of the academia-policy interface, are equipped to leverage evidence to effectively advocate and affect change. Your financial support allows us to continue this important work.
How would your contribution help us to tackle the world’s most pressing poverty-related issues?
We have recently been approached by a very generous donor, who would like to remain anonymous, but who is offering to match any donations that we receive up to the 31st December 2020 and up to the value of $40,000.
This means that any donation you make today will have double the impact.
Health Impact Fund
The HIF aims to incentivise the development of new medicines for the global poor by delinking the price of drugs from the cost of research.
The project is led by Thomas Pogge (ASAP founder and Global Board member), and economist Aidan Hollis.
As currently designed, pharmaceutical markets have a fundamental flaw that mainly affects poor people: the development of new medicines is funded exclusively through markups protected by patents. This flaw causes research neglect of diseases concentrated among the poor. It deprives poor people of access to patented medicines even when these can be mass-produced cheaply. HIF will address this flaw by creating complementary incentives that decouple the price of medicines from the fixed costs of innovation and cover the latter through health impact rewards by encouraging pharmaceutical innovators to register new drugs for participation in ten consecutive annual payouts. Each round of payment is divided among registered products according to health gains achieved the preceding year. These reward payments will enable innovators to recoup their R&D expenses and make appropriate profits while, at the same time, allowing the price of these registered medicines to be capped – covering merely their lowest feasible cost of manufacture and distribution. The result will be more affordable drugs to those in middle and lower income countries.
The first step is a 5 year pilot. Find out more about how the Health Impact Fund is progressing.
Launch of the HIF Pilot in Kerala, India
Manifesto Poverty Audits
ASAP has developed a methodology and approach for critically reviewing the impact of policies on poverty levels. Called Poverty Audits, the organisation has over the past five years supported multiple country Chapters to conduct audits around national elections.
ASAP Oceania were the first to pilot the audits in 2013. They produced a ground-breaking assessment looking into the manifestos of the three major Australian political parties. The report sets out the implications of the policies for poverty alleviation in key areas including: education, Indigenous policy, housing, foreign aid, migration and many others. Read the report here. Five years on, in 2018, the Oceania Chapter expanded this work to critically review the Australian Government’s progress towards the SDGs. Called: Australia, Poverty, and the Sustainable Development Goals, the report lays out evidence clearly setting out why further action is needed and makes a series of recommendations. Both reports coordinated experts in multiple dimensions of poverty to write brief, accessible responses to Government policy.
The Poverty Audit approach has also been adopted by ASAP Chapters in the UK and Canada, similarly reviewing the policy platforms of major political parties running during national elections. The UK Audit in 2017 saw 29 academics from 23 Universities analyse the running manifestos of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties on 12 key poverty-related topics. The report gained widespread media attention and acclaim. Find out more about the methodology, the report itself, and listen to ASAP Global Executive Cat Tully talking about the project on the ASAP UK\’s poverty audit website.
To build on these past successes, one of the priorities for ASAP Global is to support more Chapters to conduct these innovative appraisals. They are effective means to hold parties and governments to account for their actions to address poverty at home within a country but also towards global commitments, such as through the SDGs.
Producing the Oslo Principles
In 2012, a group of legal experts from around the world, convened by Dutch Advocate-General Jaap Spier and ASAP co-founder Thomas Pogge set out to answer a pressing climate crisis-related question: how much do human rights and other sources of law require each state to do to reduce emissions, even in the absence of a specific treaty?
Greenhouse gas emissions that were escalating at the time, but that continue to rise at an alarming rate still today, stand to compromise the rights of billions of people around the world. Yet, there was an evident lack of explicit treaties legally binding states to curb their emissions. This was the problem the experts set out to resolve.
After several years of extensive legal research and discussions the group undersigned a set of principles at a meeting in Oslo, Norway, which were adopted in March 2015 as the Oslo Principles on Global Climate Change Obligations. The principles detail how international laws such as human rights law and tort law may already require states to reduce their emissions, irrespective of other specific treaties. This work was subsequently expanded to include an examination of the obligations of private enterprises to prevent climate change. Find out more about the impact of these initiatives on the Global Justice Programme website at Yale University.
Redefining Migration Discourse
In June 2019, ASAP Global in partnership with Club de Madrid and Global Justice Now, held a colloquium that brought together a focussed group of interdisciplinary specialists from academia, policy and civil society.
Much of the global narrative around migration seeks to perpetuate dishonest and emotive narratives that distort wider public understandings and cast migrants as negative and disruptive influences on economies and social order. The event aimed to bring together expert knowledge to understand how we can create a significant shift in the positioning of the migration debate.
The panel discussed how current accounts of migration are grounded in deep structural inequalities. Therefore, there is a need to reframe public policy and discourse towards a more sympathetic environment for migration that focuses on the universality of humans. It would encourage a politics of kindness and should be much more closely connected with wider global issues associated with development and the distribution of capital.
To build on the success of the London event we are currently organising a series of follow up workshops that will explore what a more positive migrant discourse looks like and how, as a network, we can use this to shape recommendations that can transform political and public perceptions of migrants.
The Future of ASAP
2020 is an exciting time for the ASAP network. Interest in our work is rapidly growing, not only at the membership level for established Chapters but also new Chapters which we currently see growing in six new countries.
At the same time, we are in the genesis of working with country leads to create a programme of inter-Chapter collaborative research projects for 2021. These stand to produce cutting edge evidence on the most pressing poverty problems the world is facing.
Your donation will enable us to carry out this vital work. From the ASAP Network family, THANK YOU.
