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This paper investigates the impact of aid for trade (AfT) targeted at trade policies on the participation of recipient countries in global value chains (GVCs), and how this impact varies with their prevailing political regimes. In democratic countries, the need for the authorities to account for the interests of various stakeholders (e.g., lobbies, trade unions) can compromise the allocation, use, and effectiveness of AfT. In contrast, less democratic regimes are typically more insulated from political pressures, which may lead to more effective outcomes of aid. At the same time, integration into some complex GVCs requires efficient and democratic institutions, to which these products are sensitive. Employing a sample of 110 countries and data covering 2002-2018, we control for standard determinants of GVC participation, while examining the effect of AfT and the moderating role of the political regime in place. Our estimation addresses the endogeneity of aid through an appropriate instrumentation strategy. Our results suggest that the effect of AfT is mostly positive in autocratic regimes, indicating more effective trade policy reforms. When we account for regional disparities, we find evidence that AfT for trade policy is also impactful in some democratic regimes. This might suggest that the efficacy of AfT is not strictly regime-dependent, but hinges on the government’s commitment to carry out significant reforms leading to greater participation in the global economy.

Many colonies in Africa attained independence through negotiated settlements. However, several others engaged in armed liberation struggles, for example, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Newly independent states provided liberation movements with bases on their territories and political, military, intellectual, ideological, material, and moral support. In West Africa, Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, a notable pan-Africanist, declared in his Independence Day speech in 1957, “Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” In East Africa, Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta, the first presidents of independent Tanzania and Kenya respectively, showed similar commitment to Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism by hosting refugees fleeing armed struggles in Southern Africa. Tanzania hosted the Organization of African Unity Liberation Committee supported anticolonial resistance and liberation movements. President Nyerere supported them for “challenging injustices of empire and apartheid” and declared, “I train freedom fighters”. He encouraged Tanzanians living around liberation movement camps to welcome these movements and their freedom fighters and also protect them from agents of colonial governments. Support also came from many other countries on the continent including Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Algeria. The latter provided sanctuary to representatives of liberation movements such as Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa.

The Hamburg Sustainability Conference (HSC) 2026 convened around 1,600 participants from 112 countries at a moment of profound disruption and redistribution of power. The HSC confirmed sustainability as the organizing framework linking peace and stability, economic
resilience and competitiveness, planetary boundaries and international cooperation. The rules-based international order is under pressure, fiscal space is shrinking and conflicts are multiplying, while climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion are compounding
these pressures on economies and societies already stretched thin. Yet the world has never possessed greater technological capabilities, financial wealth and scientific knowledge. What matters now is how we use these resources to deliver shared prosperity and resilience.
The discussions at HSC 2026 can be summarized along three narrative arcs. The first asks why cooperation remains essential in a more multipolar world. Legitimacy depends on changing the terms of North–South relations, broadening representation and building a cooperative multipolar order in which a wider group of actors can shape and defend common rules. The launch of the South–North Commission on Development offers a structured process for rethinking international cooperation toward fairer partnerships and a  sustainability Agenda beyond 2030. The second narrative arc examines what needs to change. Sustainability transformation pays
off economically, but only where investment can flow, risks are shared and governance is predictable. Nature and human capital are systematically undervalued. The bottleneck is the institutional and financing structures needed to unlock them at scale. The third narrative arc addresses how cooperation can deliver. It shows that partnerships accelerate sustainable development when they move from one-off initiatives to systems that mobilize finance, create markets and build local capabilities. Scaling Capital for Sustainable Development (SCALED), Innovative Capital Mobilization in Africa (ICAMA), critical-mineral and hydrogen partnerships, and urban examples from Mombasa and eThekwini show how tangible forms of cooperation can turn commitments into sustainable investment, deeper value chains and locally owned action. This shift is especially visible in Africa, where partnerships are increasingly framed around opportunity, value creation and agency. The road ahead runs through the Triple COP+ year, the G20 under UK chairmanship, and the SDG Summit in September 2027. HSC 2026 demonstrated that navigating the new - disruptive - normal is possible. The task now is to prove it at scale. […]

Climate-induced planned relocation is becoming an unavoidable policy issue for some highly exposed communities. Although relocation should remain a last resort after other realistic options for adaptation in place have been assessed, ensuring that the money is available when needed to support relocation is critical. The challenge is that funding is insufficient, drawn from diverse sources and often arrives too late and in fragmented forms: for example, one project for housing, another for infrastructure, and little predictable support for consultation, land negotiations, safeguards, livelihoods, host communities or long-term maintenance. The financing problem is therefore not only the scale of the costs, but the difficulty of organising money over time and across institutions and safeguards. This can leave governments reacting after crises rather than planning before risks become unmanageable.
Sovereign trust funds offer one practical way to address this gap. They do not create finance by themselves, but they can provide a country-owned platform for receiving, sequencing and reporting domestic revenue, bilateral support, multilateral development bank (MDB) finance, climate funds, disaster risk finance, and loss and damage resources. They present an alternative to predominantly loan- and grant-based financing for planned relocation. Fiji’s Climate Relocation of
Communities Trust Fund shows both the promise and limits of this approach: It provides a legal and institutional basis for relocation finance within government and links international funding to procedures, but it still requires capitalisation, administrative capacity and long-term technical support. The model presents an opportunity to support sovereign, rights-based financing systems rather than relying solely on donor-funded, often piecemeal relocation projects. It can also make funding available at the appropriate time and without undue time pressure.
Key policy messages:
• Finance planned relocation before a crisis, especially assessment, consent, land, safeguards and project preparation.
• Treat relocation as a long-term investment in the collective good, rather than solely as a construction or emergency response measure.
• Support sovereign trust funds where they are legally mandated at the national level, budget-linked, transparent and capitalised.
• Use finance to uphold quality and rights, including community-led processes, support for host communities and support for long-term livelihoods.

This paper examines how leadership gender configurations shape digitalisation and innovation in Egyptian manufacturing. Using the 2020/21 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey (EIFBS) covering 2,338 firms, we construct a four-category gender variable (female owners and male managers (FOMM), male owners and female managers (MOFM), female owners and female managers (FOFM) and all-male baseline) and analyse how these owner–manager gender mixes relate to the adoption of digital technologies (DT) and to innovation outputs, and how these relationships vary by firm size and DT use. Our analysis suggests that firms with male owners and female managers (MOFM) are most likely to adopt DT across specifications. The cross-sectional data suggests that mixed-gender firms are associated with a higher probability of spending on R&D, but not with higher innovation outputs in firms with female owners (i.e. FOMM and FOFM) – pointing toward an innovation conversion gap in those firms. Heterogeneity results show that the MOFM adoption premium of DT and a negative association between FOMM and innovation are strongest in small firms. DT use moderates gender gaps: female-owned firms not using DT are significantly less likely than all-male firms to generate innovation outputs, but this penalty disappears when female-owned firms use DT. A combined size–sector analysis suggests that the divergence between MOFM and FOMM/FOFM is driven mainly by small food manufacturers, with average marginal effects elsewhere broadly comparable. The results highlight leadership composition as a correlate of technology adoption and the role of DT in converting innovation inputs into outputs.

This paper investigates the determinants and dynamics of labour demand and specifically informal labour in Egypt’s manufacturing sector, using nationally representative firm-level data from the 2020/21 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey. Applying ordinary least squares and fractional logit models, we analyse total employment, the share of informal labour, and its average annual change over the firm life cycle. Three key findings emerge. First, employment is positively associated with capital, exporting, technology adoption, innovation, industrial zones, worker training, and managerial education, and negatively associated with sole proprietorships, wages, and total factor productivity. Second, informal employment is more common among private sector firms, sole proprietorships, and firms using more part-time workers, and less prevalent among firms adopting technology or led by more educated managers. Third, changes in informality over time are modest: most formal firms exhibit no change in the share of informal workers. Notably, formal firms that did not initially employ informal labour tend to increase their informal share, while firms that formalised continue to rely heavily on informal employment. Together, these findings underscore the persistence of informality and limited transitions towards full formalisation within Egypt’s formal manufacturing sector.

Countries now act in an international cooperation architecture whose rules are disputed from several directions at once. One of those directions is the hegemon itself, the US. The paper argues that the Trump administration’s disruption matters because it moves the largest actor from affirming to contesting across several arenas at once. That reshuffles the calculus for every country. This paper asks how countries can exercise agency when the international order itself is fragmenting. The paper surveys the bewildering array of concepts on state agency and proposes a schema built on two continua. The first is the medium or type of agency, meaning material/institutional versus ideational/discursive. The second is orientation to the prevailing order in a specific arena (not in general) as affirming versus contesting. Countries are not fixed in one position. Whether the same state contests the rules depends on its interests in a particular arena. Each potential position is available only to a country that can pay the arena’s entry fee. The entry fee is the resources, broadly defined, a position demands before a country can take it up. The paper sets out the strategic positions available in a fragmenting system. It names a further position, norm imperialism, where material instruments are turned against an ideational object. The implications for different types of country are discussed.

This chapter seeks to explain why development cooperation norms that looked stable in the mid-2010s became contested after 2016. We link this to crisis politics and the post-2030 agenda. Here, the ‘good old days’ means the mid-2010s cooperation moment. In 2015, four agreements were adopted within months: the 2030 Agenda (SDGs), the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development. Their adoption set shared expectations about collective action. These agreements did not create a single regime, but they shared a narrative of common problems, shared responsibility, and multilateral problem-solving, backed by monitoring, review, and had a basis in evidence. Only a decade later, that consensus has evaporated. Development cooperation faces intersecting pressures operating through budget contractions, institutional precarity, and public narratives fuelled by the populist right in many DAC donor countries. In this new context, many DAC donors are shifting attention towards direct national interests, including security, migration policing, and geo-politics/geo-economic priorities, amid fiscal squeeze, intensified by the Trump 2.0 administration’s anti-multilateralism. Our chapter argues that the mid-2010s moment was highly contingent on an alignment of interests, institutions, and policy narratives, rather than a settled consensus, and that shifting political ‘mood’ has unravelled that spirit dramatically. We use a policy norm dynamics framework that traces norm contestation through actors and networks, institutions, and context and policy narratives, and introduces ‘epochal moods’ as the over-arching political climate that shape the nature and form of development cooperation. We outline the competing normative regimes of development cooperation and what they imply for positioning on a post-SDG/post-2030 collective framework.

Data and code that form the basis of the analyses and findings presented in the accompanying publication “African youth and the future of democracy: How social media and cohort size shape political participation” by Godfred Bonnah-Nkansah and Christine Hackenesch, published in Government & Opposition. The dataset comprises individual-level youth data (for persons 15-29 years old), in thirty-nine (39) African countries sampled in the Afrobarometer survey Rounds 6-9, complemented by country-level data on GDP per Capita from the World Bank; youth bulge ratio from the United Nations (UN) Population Bureau; and the V-Dem liberal democracy index.

Etwa die Hälfte der einkommensschwachen Länder ist derzeit zahlungsunfähig oder hat ein großes Risiko, zahlungsunfähig zu werden. Was die Weltgemeinschaft dagegen tun muss, erläutert eine IDOS-Wissenschaftlerin.

Niels Keijzer, Hyeyoung Woo & Jee Hee Yoon outline the potential ways middle powers may best organise to shoulder the global development agenda and the (quasi-) multilateral institutions could support them in this regard?

With the world’s attention fixed on the Strait of Hormuz, developments in North Africa have made fewer headlines in Europe. The crises in the Middle East are likely to deepen the geostrategic interdependence of North Africa and Europe, creating opportunities for both regions.

In the face of ever-new temperature records and serious natural disasters, the effects of climate change no longer appear to be just abstract visions of
the future. The fears triggered by global warming, particularly in the Global North, are strongly focused on the issues of forced displacement and migration. The fear that climate change could rob millions of people—especially in the Global South—of their homes soon, and that these people could
then set off for Europe or North America as climate refugees, is reflected in countless media reports in recent years. Furthermore, non-governmental
organizations regularly use the alarmist, if not to say doomsday, narrative of a steady increase in the number of climate refugees and the existential
threat posed by climate change to billions of people worldwide to promote their work. The scientific debate on the links between climate change and human mobility has intensified considerably over the last 15 years, and numerous research projects, some of them large-scale, have been launched on the topic of “climate migration.” This chapter wants to reflect on the findings of these research activities, also considering global migration trends. The fundamental implications for the political and (global) social handling of the nexus between climate change and human mobility will be worked out.

This chapter deals with climate mobility and how it is addressed in international politics. Yet, no internationally binding convention explicitly addresses climate-related mobility. However, there are a couple of existing agreements, frameworks, policy processes and related institutions offering potential scope to address various aspects of the climate-mobility nexus. The policy landscape shaped in this way cuts across different policy and action areas such as climate policy, disaster risk management, human rights or migration/displacement policy. Particularly relevant frameworks and processes – including, for instance, the Global Compact on Migration or the Sendai Framework – and institutions such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) are analysed in this chapter. Furthermore, the chapter also highlights focus areas of action in the contemporary policy landscape that has been formed around the topic of climate mobility and briefly explores potential future (coordination) models for this policy landscape.

Das Ziel dieser Studie war es, gängige Narrative und Frames zu umwelt- und klimabedingter menschlicher Mobilität zu analysieren und einzuordnen. Frames und Narrative prägen die Wahrnehmung und Bewertung von Migration, indem sie bestimmten Akteuren spezifische Rollen und Verantwortlichkeiten zuschreiben.

Die Studie konzentriert sich innerhalb des öffentlichen Diskurses auf mediale Narrative. Dazu wurden 95 Artikel deutschsprachiger Leitmedien aus dem Zeitraum von August 2020 bis August 2024 untersucht. Die Auswertung erfolgte mittels qualitativer Inhaltsanalyse unter Verwendung der Kodierungssoftware MaxQDA. Dabei kam ein deduktiv-induktives Kodierungssystem zum Einsatz, um die Ergebnisse systematisch zu erfassen und miteinander zu vergleichen. Die deduktive Kodierung basierte auf einem Diskursanalyseschema, das zentrale Aspekte diagnostischer, prognostischer und motivationaler Framings berücksichtigt.

Im Rahmen der Diskursanalyse konnten drei prägende Narrative identifiziert werden, die die mediale Berichterstattung über umweltbedingte Mobilität maßgeblich beeinflussen: (a) Der dominante humanitär-wissenschaftliche Diskurs: das Leid des Südens und die Verantwortung des Nordens, (b) Der marginale Abwehrdiskurs: „Das Boot ist voll“ und „Klimaflüchtlinge gibt es eigentlich nicht“ und (c) Der aufkommende Diskurs zu Klimaflucht im Globalen Norden: differenziert und individualisiert.

Diese Studie ist Teil des UBA-Forschungsvorhabens „Politik am Nexus Umwelt, Entwicklung und Migration kohärent gestalten“ und trägt zur besseren Einordnung sowie zum tieferen Verständnis des öffentlichen Diskurses über diesen Nexus und seine gesellschaftliche Bedeutung bei.

Die Auswirkungen des Klimawandels auf Flucht und Migration sind nicht mehr nur eine abstrakte Zukunftsvision. Die zunehmende Häufigkeit und Intensität von Extremereignissen wie Wirbelstürmen oder Dürren sowie immer neuer Temperaturrekorde auf der ganzen Welt haben einen maßgeblichen Einfluss auf Umsiedlungspläne, Binnenvertreibung und in geringerem Maße auf grenzüberschreitende Vertreibung. Die Ängste, die durch die globale Erwärmung ausgelöst werden, sind – insbesondere im Globalen Norden – auch eng mit den Themen Vertreibung und Migration verbunden. Die Befürchtung, dass der Klimawandel schon bald zig Millionen Menschen, gerade im Globalen Süden, ihrer Heimat berauben und sie dann als Flüchtlinge nach Europa treiben könnte, spiegelt sich in unzähligen Medienberichten der letzten Jahre wider. Immer wieder befeuerten umstrittene Prognosen zum Ausmaß der erwarteten »Klimaflucht« die mediale Aufmerksamkeit […]. Der Beitrag beginnt mit einem globalen Profil der klimabedingten Vertreibung auf der Basis aktueller Daten. Anschließend wird der wissenschaftliche Diskurs über den Zusammenhang zwischen Klima und Vertreibung dargestellt. Im dritten Teil des Beitrags werden die rechtlichen und politischen Rahmenbedingungen analysiert, in denen Vertreibung im Kontext des Klimawandels grundsätzlich berücksichtigt und adressiert wird.

Bemerkbar macht sich die menschengemachte globale Erwärmung etwa in der Nahrungsmittel- und Wassersicherheit, bei Wirtschaftssystemen, bei Siedlungs- und Infrastrukturen, bei bewaffneten Konflikten, bei der Kultur oder auch bei Flucht und Migration. Ebenso gibt es bedeutende Wechselwirkungen mit der Künstlichen Intelligenz, einem anderen großen Menschheitsthema des 21. Jahrhunderts. Dieses Heft möchte genau diese Themen unter die Lupe nehmen und darlegen, wie die Klimakrise sich auf die genannten Bereiche ausgewirkt hat bzw. welche Wechselbeziehungen es jeweils gibt. Es soll allein um den Kenntnisstand zum Status Quo gehen, nicht um Prognosen oder mögliche Szenarien. In einer Schlussbetrachtung wird versucht, die dargelegten Erkenntnisse einzuordnen.

images of people scaling the fence into Ceuta and Melilla fuel the perception of a loss of control. Yet these people cannot simply travel on to the rest of the EU, nor are its external borders the real threat. Rather, the threats lie in the scapegoating and the knee-jerk call for isolation. Both obscure the view of what could be possible: partnership on equal terms to create opportunities for local youth, regulated entry coupled with justified deportation, and honest information.

Exacerbated by the cuts in development cooperation (DC), many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are currently facing severe financial constraints. Against this backdrop, higher domestic revenue is a desirable goal for most countries. Greater attention is being devoted to enhancing domestic revenue in the international development policy discourse too – across the entire political spectrum. For some, the goal is to extend the decision-making scope of government and enhance the development focus of public action, while others hope to relieve the burden of transfers on industrialised nations of the Global North and end the recipient countries’ “addiction” to DC payments. Yet what options are actually available to LMICs to generate more domestic revenue? The present policy brief shows that taxing personal income and landed property in particular could offer opportunities for additional revenue. Another important area is the rationalisation of tax expenditures, which often lead to substantially less revenue without providing any evident benefit. At the same time, however, it is also important to recognise the systemic – and eminently political – nature of tax reforms. Above and beyond the issue of technical and administrative feasibility, the political achievability of reforms must also be taken into
account. Short-term tax increases – for example through higher consumer taxes or tariffs – are often not very sustainable in their own right.
Instead, the aim must be to place the “fiscal contract” between taxpayers and the state on a broader and more stable base where better public services also play a role. One type of revenue (in this case DC) therefore cannot simply be replaced by another (taxes) – a fact that advocates of DC cuts often fail to mention. During the transition, DC must continue to provide contributions, despite declining overall funds.
International players, including the German Government and the EU, can support partner governments in a variety of ways. They are already doing so, for example by promoting the Addis Tax Initiative (ATI). In addition, Germany and the EU should make a determined effort to help strengthen multilateral approaches to cooperation. This particularly applies to the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on International Tax Coopera-tion currently being negotiated.