Nature Based Solutions for Sustainable Urban Storm Water Management in Global South: A Short Review

Rapid urbanization in the Global South exacerbates urban water management challenges such as urban flooding and water pollution, rendering many areas water-insecure. Our reliance on grey infrastructures to combat these water management challenges is not sustainable in the long run, due to which a better alternative must be sought. Nature-based Solution (NBS) promote ecosystem services and enhance climate resiliency along with flood control and improvement of water quality by utilizing natural elements including green spaces and water bodies within the urban environment. In the past few decades, NBS have been adapted for urban drainage in Global North and evolved by means of various terms based on geographic location, practices and applications. Some of these well-known terms include Low Impact Development (LIDs), Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS), Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) and Best Management Practices (BMPs). The transition towards a resilient and sustainable environment has been made possible through the application of NBS. Recently, countries in the Global South such as Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand are trying to alter urban storm water management strategies through conversion of grey infrastructure to green infrastructure by employing various NBS techniques. The findings of this study show how NBS has influenced the Global South’s urban water management.

A review on discourse studies concerning migrants in media publications from Brazil and South Africa: towards more Afro-Latin perspectives

This paper reviews scientific literature about representation on migrants in Global South media and in other parts of the world, focusing on comparative studies in Brazil and South Africa, and providing suggestions for less Eurocentric perspectives relating to such topic. We resort to a critical review on theoretical references and multiple studies published between the second half of the last century and the beginning of this century. South African comparative research through meta-studies and their quantitative tendency —alongside French Discourse Analysis, Bakhtinian Circle and Greimas’ influence in Brazil— indicate how this type of research needs to be expanded in the Global South. This paper recommends the construction of more systematic content-based analyses and the exploration of the different degrees and forms through which balanced or patronizing portrayals on migrants are projected in media. Dislocation from a dominant sociocognitive perspective towards inter-semiotic/sociolinguistic approaches is advisable. This work also suggests that Pan-Africanism, African approaches, and/or Latin-American philosophies should be part of this foundation for migration criticism, especially if these migratory processes are analyzed in media or communication context

Labor and environment in global value chains: an evolutionary policy study with a three-sector and two-region agent-based macroeconomic model

The world economy crucially depends on multi-layered value chains with high degrees of sector-related specialization. Its final products are of international character and serve the needs and wants of the global citizen. However, many production processes are causing severe damage to the environment and moreover create health hazard for workers and local populations. This research article focuses on the increasing global unequal economic- and ecological exchange, fundamentally embedded in international trade. Resource extraction and labor conditions in the Global South as well as the implications for climate change originating from industry emissions in the North are investigated with an agent-based model. The model serves as a testbed for simulation experiments with evolutionary political economic policies. An international institution is introduced sanctioning the polluting extractivist sector in the Global South as well as the emitting industrial capital good producers in the North with the aim of subsidizing innovation reducing environmental and social impacts. Both regions are modelled as macroeconomic complex adaptive systems where international trade is restricted to a three-sector value chain, originating from mining resources in the South that are traded to capital good producers in the North crafting machinery which is eventually traded to consumer good firms, both in the North and South. The main outcome of the study is that sanctions alone are not effective in countering unequal exchange. They only make a difference in combination with subsidies for innovation activities, which are protecting labor and reducing local pollution in mines as well as reducing carbon-emissions in capital good production.

Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982

In 1893, a group of colonial officials from thirteen countries abandoned their imperial rivalry and established the International Colonial Institute (ICI), which became the world's most important colonial think tank of the twentieth century. Through the lens of the ICI, Florian Wagner argues that this international cooperation reshaped colonialism as a transimperial and governmental policy. The book demonstrates that the ICI's strategy of using indigenous institutions and customary laws to encourage colonial development served to maintain colonial rule even beyond the official end of empires. By selectively choosing loyalists among the colonized to participate in the ICI, it increased their autonomy while equally delegitimizing more radical claims for independence. The book presents a detailed study of the ICI's creation, the transcolonial activities of its prominent members, its interactions with the League of Nations and fascist governments, and its role in laying the groundwork for the structural and discursive dependence of the Global South after 1945.