Alison Evans gives her (and her ODI colleagues’) list of hits and misses for international development in 2010 here. Its an interesting list and one issue that repeats itself in many forms is global governance. Multilateralism is facing a big challenge – whether it is in dealing with the financial crisis, climate change or global terrorism. This also highlights how globalised we have become, with so many of these development problems being regarded as global challenges, with calls for joint global action.
The successes were hard-earned and will continue to add up. But lots more got pushed back to another year, and should rank amongst ‘things that went wrong’ in 2010; so, a few more of these on my list are –
- Migration laws got worse in many ‘developed’ countries
- US’ failure to be progressive in the climate talks, even as India and China continue to flip-flop
- Insufficient headway made in the global wars on terror; and in curbing local terrorist violence in countries like Pakistan
- India’s excruciatingly slow progress in human development (easily a global development issue, now that nearly half of the New Bottom Billion lives there)
Suvojit Chattopadhyay 