By Denise Humphreys Bebbington, Ricardo Verdum, Anthony Bebbington The Amazon basin is home to over 385 indigenous groups, including 71 groups living in voluntary isolation, and the world’s largest intact tropical rainforest.  These two facts are not unrelated. Indeed studies...

By Ana Cecilia Dinerstein In the past two decades, indigenous peoples’ movements have become more visible and stronger in the global struggle for social justice, particularly against new economic policies based on extractivism, land grabbing and the privatisation of ejidos...

By Susan Johnson Effective campaigning by activists such as Extinction Rebellion and Youth4Climate Strikers has led a number of municipalities, town and district councils to declare climate emergencies. Among Extinction Rebellion’s demands is that of using Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) to...

By Roy Maconachie,Thomas Kjeldsen and Lee Bryant In many African countries, the artisanal and small-scale gold mining sector is largely informal, generating pressing environmental and health impacts. Together with colleagues (Dr Solomon Gbanie, Kabba Bangura and Anthony Kamara) from the...

By Katharina Lenner Self-reliance has become an evermore important element of international responses to refugee crises in recent years. It is, for example, core to the UN Global Compact for Refugees, which came into force late last year after years...

By Bethany Shockley When the Middle East and North Africa Social Policy Network (MENASP) (convened by Dr. Rana Jawad) received funding from the Carnegie Corporation in New York to engage with policymakers in the Middle East, “Policy Labs” were among...

By Britta K. Matthes and Mateusz Zatoński In May 2017, just months before the end of her second term as Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Margaret Chan spoke about championing the WHO’s mission to fight tobacco use as...

By Melanie Channon In 2014 the UN Human Rights Council (finally) formally acknowledged the link between menstruation and gender equality. Until recently, research around menstruation, where it existed, was bio-medically focused, ignoring the myriad of related social and cultural issues....

By Ben Radley Since 1980, the World Bank has loaned more than $1 billion to low-income country (LIC) governments across Africa to privatise, liberalise and deregulate their mining sectors. Supported by the most recent commodity super-cycle, this resulted in the...