中美两国太空安全领域的互动

作为第四空间的太空是国际争夺的战略制高点。中美两国在太空领域有着广泛利益,涉及其国家安全与经济繁荣以及国际声望。中美两国之间的太空关系,事关国际战略稳定与平衡。尽管两国都主张太空安全,但是中美太空安全观大相径庭,在如何确保太空安全的方式上存在巨大差异。中国在安全困境下考虑和实施太空政策,谋求太空安全;美国则是推进太空武器化,保证美国治下的太空安全。两国在太空安全领域上进行了针锋相对的较量。美国使用传统守成大国对待崛起大国的方法,不仅研发更先进的(反)太空技术,而且也禁止中美太空合作,同时拼凑同盟,封堵中国(反)太空能力的发展。与美国相比,中国应对美国太空封堵手段相对较少,只有潜心发展自己的(反)太空能力,才能确保太空资产安全和国家安全。在外交场合下,在禁止太空军备竞赛与《禁止生产用于核武器及爆炸装置的裂变材料条约》、禁止太空武器化的国际条约与自愿性质的国际太空行为规范准则两组问题上,中美两国也进行了互不妥协的对抗。为降低两国在太空安全领域的对抗烈度,中美两国开启了民用太空对话与太空安全对话机制,同时,也不排除特朗普政府未来会启用中美外交安全对话机制处理太空安全问题。     

Political economy,poverty, and polycentrism in the Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) for Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change adaptation refers to altering infrastructure, institutions or ecosystems to respond to the impacts of climate change. Least developed countries often lack the requisite capacity to implement adaptation projects. The Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) is a scheme where industrialised countries have disbursed $934.5 million in voluntary contributions to support 213 adaptation projects across 51 least developed countries. But how effective are its efforts—and what sort of challenges have arisen as it implements projects? To provide some answers, this article documents the presence of four “political economy” attributes of adaptation projects—processes we have termed enclosure, exclusion, encroachment and entrenchment—cutting across economic, political, ecological and social dimensions. Based on extensive field research, we find the four processes at work simultaneously in our case studies of five LDCF projects being implemented in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, the Maldives and Vanuatu. The article concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the political economy of adaptation for analysts, program managers and climate researchers at large. In sum, the politics of adaptation must be taken into account so that projects can maximise their efficacy and avoid marginalising those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.     

Stealing into the wild: conservation science,plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures

Faced with pressing climatic changes, scientific and industrial interests are vying to develop crops that can survive drought, floods and shifting pest regimes. Increasingly, they look for solutions in an unlikely place: the gene pools of wild plants. Crop wild relatives (CWR) – species closely related to crops, including their ancestors – offer breeders the allure of retracing the domestication bottleneck, infusing genomes of modern crops with ‘lost’ genetic variety. Yet wild relatives also confront threats from climate change, urbanization and expansion of industrial agri-food. Thus, CWR, seen as both salvational and threatened, have become an international conservation and food-security priority. It is my contention that, in their common project to harness wild-relative potential, conservation and breeding science are co-evolving to extend seed commodity relations into new spheres. I examine enclosures along two fronts: first within ‘systematic CWR conservation’, where ‘in situ’ approaches, typically regarded as empowering and sustainable alternatives to ‘ex situ’, instead may support a complementary system of value extraction; second, in breeding and biotechnology research, which produces new value for CWR while profoundly shaping upstream conservation priorities. An important finding is that although today’s ‘ex situ-centric’ complementarity favors dispossession, an ‘in situ-centric’ approach could foster democratic renewal of biocultural diversity.     

气候变化对青藏高原水资源安全的影响

青藏高原不仅是世界屋脊、亚洲水塔和地球第三极,也是中国重要的生态安全屏障和战略资源储备基地,更是资源政治与地缘政治的结合之处。青藏高原是世界上第三大淡水资源“储存库”,气候变化会加速高原地区的冰川消融,改变跨国界河流径流量的年度和季节性变化,增加水资源分配模式的不稳定性,从而加剧地区性水资源稀缺性危机,使地区性洪涝灾害增多,水治理难度提升。气候变化对青藏高原水资源安全的影响会产生连锁性的政治、经济与安全效应,不仅影响高原地区国家的水力开发计划与基础设施安全,加剧地缘政治博弈的复杂性,而且影响中国的海外水电投资,使中国的“一带一路”倡议和水利“十三五”发展规划的实施面临更多的国际压力与挑战。在气候变化的影响下,青藏高原水资源安全涉及十几亿人口的生存和发展问题,涉及亚洲的稳定与和平。对此,中国应积极实践构建人类命运共同体理念,在青藏高原水资源安全的维护上扮演更重要的角色,一方面在技术层面上加强对青藏高原水资源安全动态的深度调查与持续性跟踪研究,另一方面在政治层面上推动高原地区国家的气候治理合作与区域合作框架构建。     

2030年可持续发展议程下“人的安全”及其治理

2030年可持续发展议程作为一项新的全球发展计划,其目标是构建免于恐惧和暴力的和平、公正、包容的社会,其核心是消除全球贫困与促进包容性发展,包括消除贫困、饥饿以及应对气候变化等内容。该议程的主体内容体现了联合国所倡导的“人的安全”理念,这一理念强调各种威胁的相互关联性,人的安全和人的发展是同一事物相辅相成的,这种治理观要求广泛借助联合国系统,并且顾及地方、国家、区域和国际范围内各级公私部门行为体的特点和资源,拓展一种由各种利益攸关方组成的综合框架,其内容涉及粮食安全、气候安全、环境安全、社会安全、反恐、移民等重要的传统与非传统安全议题。其中,气候变化、资源消耗、南北差距等问题是可持续发展难以实现的重要动因。上述安全议程同时体现了各种广泛的经济、社会和环境关联性。因此,建构全球“人的安全”治理机制需以联合国为核心,并形成多层治理、建构广泛的国际伙伴关系,以实现联合国所倡议的全球可持续和平愿景。     

Pathway to resilience: hands and hearts for peasant livelihoods and fair relations between humans and nature

Abstract

Peasants and rural communities are on the front lines of most climate catastrophes taking place nowadays worldwide; at the same time, we have been the ones taking care of our common planet over generations. This article begins with a brief overview of the current situation of land use in the world today and links it to climate issues. It then describes some of the solutions to climate threats being negotiated between national governments and the private sector. It then highlights solutions that communities are already implementing and concludes with the reasons why systemic change is needed in order to achieve agrarian and climate justice.     

Negotiating hybridity in highland Bolivia: indigenous moral economy and the expanding market for quinoa

Scholars often highlight the capacity for cooperation and reciprocity as one of the most outstanding features of Andean peasants, but also raise concerns that these traditional strategies necessarily wither and fade as Andean people and places are increasingly incorporated into capitalist markets and processes. This study examines how non-market cooperative and reciprocal economic practices are affected as rural Bolivians expand production to meet a growing international demand for the Andean pseudo-grain quinoa. Based on the grounded experiences of rural Bolivians who are negotiating the modernisation and martketisation of agricultural production for the first time, I find that increasing incorporation into global markets need not undermine the moral economy of rural people, and may in fact strengthen their commitment to reciprocal and cooperative strategies. In contrast to claims that the spread of modern markets and technologies will weaken and ultimately replace cooperative strategies, I argue that reciprocity practices are important components in the construction of a new, hybrid economic space. Within this space, where economic strategies are based on moral sentiments as well as market logic, reciprocity provides a socially and ecologically appropriate ‘toolkit’ with which rural people negotiate their uneven incorporation into global capitalistic processes.     

La cooperación internacional para el desarrollo de México Un análisis de sus acciones,institucionalización y percepciones

The Mexican Law of International Development Cooperation (lidc) was published in 2011 with the purpose of reinforcing the institutional framework and developing a State policy as an activity that is inherent to foreign policy. From an institutional perspective, this paper examines some key aspects of Mexican cooperation that were developed in 2011–2014, with an emphasis on the current status of the lidc implementation. It is argued that during Felipe Calderon's administration the utter applicability of the Mexican lidc was not politically supported, thus frustrating the expectations concerning the development of a State policy on this matter. President Enrique Peña Nieto's current administration has made some progress in this direction, but it is also far from fully complying with the lidc and this has slowed down the institutionalization process of international development cooperation.     

Is there a global environmental justice movement?

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.     

Turkey and Russia in a shifting global order: cooperation,conflict and asymmetric interdependence in a turbulent region

The current global political economy is characterised by the intensifying economic interaction of BRICS and ‘near BRICS’ economies, with emerging powers increasing their influence in neighbouring regions. The growing partnership between Turkey and Russia constitutes a useful case study for examining this transformation, in which Western supremacy and US hegemony are under increasing challenge. Turkish–Russian relations shed light on broader themes in global political economy. First, significant economic interdependence may be generated among states with different political outlooks, in the form of loose regional integration schemes driven by bilateral relations between key states and supporting private actors or interests. Second, growing economic interdependence may coexist with continued political conflict and geopolitical rivalry, as indicated by the Syrian and Ukrainian crises. An important strategy that emerges is the tendency to compartmentalise economic issues and geopolitical rivalries in order to avoid negative spill-over effects. This facilitates the coexistence of extensive competition with deepening cooperation, as reflected in relations in the field of energy.