Articles

10 Items

Magazine Article - The Economist

Seeds of Change: Calestous Juma died on December 15th

| Jan. 11, 2018

Colleagues said he tweeted more than any professor they knew, and Calestous Juma’s tweets covered a swarm of things. Income inequality, and a free-trade area for Africa, you might expect. Those were the subjects he taught at Harvard: getting poorer countries, especially in Africa, to grow and thrive was the obsession of his life. But he also tweeted about a wheelchair that could climb stairs, the increasing size of steaks, and the maximum number of goats seen eating up in a tree. He was extra-delighted to send out a New York Times editorial, from 1878, about Thomas Edison’s new “aerophone”: “Something ought to be done about Mr Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope.”

Calestous Juma

Martha Stewart/HKS

Newspaper Article - The Boston Globe

Calestous Juma, 64, Champion of Sustainable International Development

    Author:
  • Bryan Marquard
| Dec. 22, 2017

A professor of the practice of international development, and a writer of great range, Calestous Juma promoted technology for the poor and vulnerable throughout the world. He also wrote a book explaining why people are wary of innovation, and delighted his more than 100,000 Twitter followers by retweeting cartoons that ribbed those who are resistant to science.

A rural stove using biomass cakes, fuelwood and trash as cooking fuel... It is a major source of air pollution in India, and produces smoke and numerous indoor air pollutants at concentrations 5 times higher than coal.

Wikipedia

Journal Article - Nature Energy

Energy decisions reframed as justice and ethical concerns

| 6 May 2016

Many energy consumers, and even analysts and policymakers, confront and frame energy and climate risks in a moral vacuum, rarely incorporating broader social justice concerns. Here, to remedy this gap, we investigate how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making by reframing five energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as pressing justice concerns.

Magazine Article - Outreach

Profile: Calestous Juma

| December 15, 2011

"The Rio+20 process is an important reminder of the urgency to guide global production and consumption patterns with sustainability principles. Sadly, there is really no genuine global institution that is championing sustainable development. The vision that inspired Rio has been supplanted by two extreme positions. The first is a group that believes economic growth will have trickle-down benefits for the environment. The environmental camp has successfully replaced the spirit of Rio with a one-sided agenda that leaves little room for recognising the central role that human wellbeing plays in natural resource management."

Gertrude Kitongo poses with her mobile phone in Johannesburg, South Africa. She cherishes a cell phone as a link to family and friends and also sees it as a radio, a library, a mini cinema, a bank teller, etc., Nov. 8, 2011.

AP Photo

Magazine Article - Finance & Development

Africa's New Engine

| December 2011

Cell phone use has grown faster in Africa than in any other region of the world since 2003....Of course, South Africa—the most developed nation—still has the highest penetration, but across Africa, countries have leapfrogged technology, bringing innovation and connectivity even to remote parts of the continent, opening up mobile banking and changing the way business is done.

Journal Article - Energy Policy

The Water–Energy Nexus in Middle East and North Africa

| August 2011

Extracting, delivering, and disposing water requires energy, and similarly, many processes for extracting and refining various fuel sources and producing electricity use water. This so-called 'water–energy nexus', is important to understand due to increasing energy demands and decreasing freshwater supplies in many areas. This paper performs a country-level quantitative assessment of this nexus in the MENA region.

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

The Security Curve and the Structure of International Politics: A Neorealist Synthesis

    Author:
  • Davide Fiammenghi
| Spring 2011

Realist scholars have long debated the question of how much power states need to feel secure. Offensive realists claim that states should constantly seek to increase their power. Defensive realists argue that accumulating too much power can be self-defeating. Proponents of hegemonic stability theory contend that the accumulation of capabilities in one state can exert a stabilizing effect on the system. The three schools describe different points along the power con­tinuum. When a state is weak, accumulating power increases its security. This is approximately the situation described by offensive realists. A state that con­tinues to accumulate capabilities will eventually triggers a balancing reaction that puts its security at risk. This scenario accords with defensive realist as­sumptions. Finally, when the state becomes too powerful to balance, its oppo­nents bandwagon with it, and the state’s security begins to increase again. This is the situation described by hegemonic stability theory. These three stages delineate a modified parabolic relationship between power and secu­rity. As a state moves along the power continuum, its security increases up to a point, then decreases, and finally increases again. This modified parabolic re­lationship allows scholars to synthesize previous realist theories into a single framework.

Journal Article - Science

Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being

| January 25, 2008

"I would urge every scientist and engineer with an interest in the intersection of S&T with sustainable well-being...to 'tithe' 10% of your professional time and effort to working in these and other ways to increase the benefits of S&T for the human condition and to decrease the liabilities. If so much as a substantial fraction of the world's scientists and engineers resolved to do this much, the acceleration of progress toward sustainable well-being for all of Earth's inhabitants would surprise us all."

Journal Article - International Journal of Technology and Globalisation

Introduction: Global Actors, Markets and Rules Driving the Diffusion of Genetically Modified (GM) Crops in Developing Countries

| 2006

"This introductory essay explains how this new technology is being driven by the actors (multinational corporations), markets (large global markets) and rules (intellectual property) of globalisation."