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The idea of a group of developing countries with shared characteristics, challenges, and needs, distinct from those of developed countries, has been central to sustainable development discourse and policy for decades. However, in the years since the original Rio conference it has become increasingly apparent that it is difficult to sustain this notion of a single developing world. Within the context of unfolding diversity, a central claim of the present paper is that lumping all countries together under the expansive category of 'developing' risks obfuscating the complex challenges, solutions, and fragmented geopolitics of sustainable development. Instead, it is necessary to use the terms developing country, countries, or world far more selectively, mindful that they may conceal just about as much as they reveal. In the paper I proceed to consider a number of alternative national, subnational, and transnational spatial categorisations which might be deployed to better describe and/or analyse the evolving nature, effective governance, and politics of sustainable development challenges across space.

A popular view of developing countries is that they are too poor to care about environmental protection. The author argues that this is an oversimplified view of development incentives, and that a more realistic approach to the problem focuses on improved implementation of environmental policies. Without outside assistance, there is a risk that mitigation commitments on developing countries could divert resources from other important development priorities. Adapted from the source document.

The past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of transnational networking initiatives aimed at addressing climate change. Previous work has suggested that these initiatives largely achieve their governance functions by fostering learning and resource acquisition. Our particular contribution seeks to advance current understanding of networking initiatives by suggesting that they may additionally perform social and emotional roles which galvanise, energise and motivate actors to pursue actions which advance domestic climate goals. To illustrate our argument, we examine GLOBE International, an inter-parliamentary institution focused on supporting the development of domestic legislation around sustainable development. Based on semi-structured interviews with legislators, we provide evidence that GLOBE functions as a network for learning, and particularly political learning. Yet participation in the group setting of the initiative's summits has additionally given rise to feelings of unity, emotional energy and inspiration. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings, which paint a richer, more complex picture of transnational climate governance than previously acknowledged in the literature.

AbstractRecent work suggests that migrants have been a major driving force in the dramatic growth of international telephony over recent decades, accounting for large rises in telephone calls between countries with strong immigrant/emigrant connections. Yet, the existing literature has done a poor job of evaluating the substantive importance of migrants in explaining large disparities in levels of bilateral voice traffic observed between different countries. It has also failed to go very far in examining how domestic and relational factors moderate (namely amplify or attenuate) the influence of migrant stocks on international calling. Our contribution addresses these gaps in the literature. For a sample, which includes a far larger number of countries than previous studies, we show that, together with shorter‐term visitors, bilateral migrant stocks emerge as the relational variable with one of the substantively largest influences over cross‐national patterns of telephone calls. We also find that the effect of bilateral migrant stocks on inter‐country telephone traffic is greater where the country pairs are richer and more spatially distant from one another.