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21. The Impact of Sustainability Codes of Conduct in the Financial Sector

Publication Date:
02-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the impact of four major financial sector sustainability codes of conduct, the UN Environmental Programme Finance Initiative, the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, the Equator Principles and the Global Alliance for Banking on Values with regard to their impact on the sustainability of their members. The codes of conduct focus on the integration of environmental, social and governance criteria into financial decision making in lending, investment, asset management and project finance. corporate sustainability voluntary codes of conduct have a positive impact on their members. The effectiveness, however, depends on the quality and content of a code, as well as on implementation and compliance mechanisms.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Markets, United Nations, and Ethics
Political Geography:
Global Focus

22. The Temporal Experience of Chinese Students Abroad and the Present Human Condition

Author:
Anders Sybrandt Hansen
Publication Date:
09-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
This article examines the experiences of Chinese elite uni- versity students abroad through the lens of temporality. In the strug- gle to get ahead, elite students are expected to carefully deploy their time. Studying abroad, it is argued, has become one more step in a culturally idealised temporal arrangement of how one is expected to go about advancing. The downside to this ethics of striving is shown to be a pervasive sense of restlessness (, fuzao). The article shows how relocating to a different life environment allowed a group of elite students to respond to their temporal predicament in existentially creative ways that registered socially as personal maturation. It is argued that these responses were set in motion by the students’ in- habiting an expanse of not-yet-purposeful time. Treating the tem- poral experience of Chinese elite students as a pronounced inflection of an increasingly global temporal mode of striving, the article en- quires into the temporality of the present human condition.
Topic:
Education, Globalization, Ethics, and Students
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Global Focus

23. Morals in International Politics

Author:
A. Orlov
Publication Date:
03-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
The world is changing fast; it is changing by leaps and bounds which makes it next to impossible to explain what is going on and to foresee possible repercussions.1 An unsophisticated observer in the West and elsewhere in the world where Western propaganda is heard and believed might imagine that the forces of freedom and democracy are waging an uncompromising struggle against despotism and tyranny (in the widest sense of the terms). It is implied that the United States and the rest of the civilized West are on the side of the forces of good confronted by an obscure conglomerate of the forces of evil, of which Russia is part if according to President Obama and certain other Western leaders. Former President of France Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has written in his memoirs that according to this interpretation the forces of good insist on democratic elections, human rights, and freedom of trade; America does not hesitate to use its might to defend good and oppose the forces of evil interfering with the fulfillment of these ideals.
Topic:
Democratization, Politics, International Affairs, Elections, and Ethics
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

24. Two Concepts of Pluralism: A Comparative Study of Mahatma Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin

Author:
Ramin Jahanbegloo
Publication Date:
12-2014
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
India International Centre (IIC)
Abstract:
When the definitive history of democratic thought in the 20th century is written, both Mohandas K. Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin will take their places as the two most distinguished theorists of the pluralist tradition. As history goes, Gandhi and Sir Isaiah never met and the latter never wrote any piece on the former. However, Isaiah Berlin visited India in 1961 and met with Jawaharlal Nehru, but he never considered seriously the views of Gandhi as an anticolonial leader. In his talk delivered in New Delhi on 13 November 1961 on ‘Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality’, Berlin presents himself as a person who is ‘shamefully ignorant of Indian civilization, even of what is most valuable and most important in it’ (Berlin, 1996: 249).
Topic:
Multiculturalism, Ethics, Philosophy, Pluralism, and Morality
Political Geography:
Global Focus

25. A New Discipline: Development Ethics

Author:
Denis Goulet
Publication Date:
08-1996
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
'Development' has long been equated with modernization and Westernization and studied as a straightforward economic issue. The discipline of economics has been the main source of policy prescription for development decisionmakers. This view is now widely criticized as ethnocentric and as economically reductionist. Change is occurring: economics itself is reintegrating ethics into its conceptualization, methodology, and analysis; a new paradigm of development is in gestation; and a new discipline, development ethics, has come into being. Development ethics centers its study of development on the value questions posed: What is the relation between having goods and being good in the pursuit of the good life; what are the foundations of a just society; and what stance should societies adopt toward nature? The new discipline emerges from two sources, which are now converging: from engagement in development action to the formulation of ethical theory, and from a critique of mainstream ethical theory to the crafting of normative strategies to guide development practice. Development ethics has a dual mission: to render the economy more human and to keep hope alive in the face of the seeming impossibility of achieving human development for all.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Ethics, Economic Growth, and Modernization
Political Geography:
Global Focus