Sustainability is a term we hear all around us. Corporations brand themselves as sustainable and attempt to build sustainability goals, measures, and metrics into their business plans and supply chains. State and local governments set sustainability targets and pursue them, installing efficiency standards and practices, encouraging the use of public transportation systems, and incentivizing cit...

If one were to compare two human rights organizations, Physicians for Human Rights USA (PHR USA) and its Israeli counterpart, one would expect to find that their activities were similar. Surely the different geographical and political context within which each organization operates influences their work, but because both are doctors’ rights groups and because both use international human rights...

How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge rather than from their sweat and muscle? This paper summarizes a collection of essays that investigate the promotion of “poor people’s knowledge”—promoting the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor countries, and particularly improving the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and skills. The collect...

Jeannine Relly and Celeste González de Bustamante have woven together multiple literatures in theoretically informed scholarship to analyze one of the most important challenges for the contemporary global world: the human rights and security of those involved in disseminating news analyses, so essential to democratic accountability. Given their binational perspectives, I respond with grassroots...

In the last five years, remote selling-led by online organizations has surged. The resulting growth has created concern among both traditional and remote sellers as they jockey for improved competitive position and governmental entities, in particular US states, over the erosion of their tax revenues as sales are diverted to remote sellers. This paper explores the issues and potential solutions...

Global population and environmental pressures are challenging multinational companies to develop new business strategies founded upon the principles of sustainability— assuring that they can meet the needs of both present and future generations of customers and stakeholders. Corporate sustainability requires understanding the “triple bottom line”, which includes economic, societal, and ecologic...

Japan is often characterized as a developmental state, i.e., a state with a strong and autonomous bureaucratic leadership that directs the economy toward achieving developmental goals. This study challenges the developmental state model, arguing that the once-powerful Japanese bureaucracy has lost much of its authority and is no longer autonomous from societal forces. By focusing on the growing...

Recurrent famine has been a major cause of mortality in the Horn of Africa. In Ethiopia, three consecutive years of drought led to widespread loss of livestock, population displacement, and malnutrition, placing an estimated 10 million persons at risk for starvation in 2000. A large proportion of the population of the Gode district in Somali region was displaced in a search for food and food ai...

O n a planet with 1.2 billion Internet users, a far less fortunate 1.2 billion people survive on less than a dollar a day. The same technology that has transformed our lives—the lives of the wealthiest people on the planet— remains out of reach and irrelevant for the poorest. As if in sudden recognition of this stark gap, we have witnessed in the past decade an explosion in projects that apply ...

Analysis of the role of NGOs as mediators of change may yield important theoretical insights into the processes by which neoliberalizing projects become embedded in and consequently transformed by specific settings. In recent decades, NGOs have played an important role in mediating intertwined and often contradictory processes of political and economic liberalization in countries around the glo...