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Mapping the Global Partnership for Development: Country-level mappings of global issues, external policies and country contexts

A country’s development prospects depend in large part on its climate and physical geography, its resource endowments, the policy choices it makes, and its institutional capacities and governance. But in a globalizing world, a country’s development prospects are shaped increasingly by a number of global issues such as trade, migration and climate change that are driven and governed in part by the policies and actions of players situated outside that country’s borders.

If developing countries are to make faster progress towards the Millennium Development Goals and sustainable human development more broadly, they need to respond effectively to the challenges and opportunities that globalization presents. And developed countries need to ensure – in-line with their commitments to build a global partnership for development – that their policies on a range of global issues, including those which go “beyond aid”, are coherent and supportive of development.

What is the aim of this initiative?
The aim of the initiative is to design and pilot a tool to systematically map the ways in which a range of global issues impact on poverty, in particular country contexts. The tool will be used to generate evidence to support pro-poor policy-making on global issues, both in developing and more developed countries.

A country-level mapping will capture information about the global issues that matter for a particular country and about how those issues play out in the context of that country. The mapping will consider a number of issues in the round, mirroring the challenge faced by policy-makers in developing (and developed) countries.

Who might use a country-level mapping and for what?
The evidence generated through these country-level mappings will be used to stimulate discussion in relation to two broad questions:

  • How might particular developing countries respond to the global issues that matter for them?
  • What might policy-makers, particularly in the developed world, do, both to support particular countries’ responses to global issues, and to make their own policies on a particular global issue more “development-friendly”?

The primary users of the evidence generated will be stakeholders in the developing country in question. Government policy-makers might use such evidence to make decisions about what policies to put in place to respond to the global issues that matter for their country. For instance, a mapping might provide evidence that the loss of nurses to the developed world is having a major impact on its ability to deliver basic health services and that this is not compensated by remittances and other positive impacts, leading the government to take steps to stem the flow. Beyond government policy-makers, Civil Society Organisations might use the evidence generated by a country-level mapping to inform their domestic and international policy advocacy.

Policy-makers in developed countries might also use the evidence generated by country-level mappings to inform their bilateral relations with, and the support they provide to, particular developing countries. For example, can the UK Government’s policy and practice in relation to trade, or to arms exports to the country in question, be made more sensitive to development concerns; and, is a particular form of support needed to enable a developing country partner to respond more effectively to the challenges of climate change?

Finally, once a number of country-level mappings have been completed, the evidence generated might be used to inform policy discussions in developed countries and at a global level about what constitutes “development-friendly” policy in relation to a number of global issues.

Templates
For each global issue, data collection will be guided by a template which sets out our assumptions about how the issue in question impacts on development, identifies appropriate indicators and suggests useful data sources. We will post templates here as they are produced.

Linnea Jonsson, Paul Ladd