India occupies a precarious position in the global climate change order. It trails only China, the United States, and the European Union in total emissions, but per capita emissions are far lower. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the 2014 elections on a strong pro-development platform and continues to wave this flag at all levels, making energy security a major priority and pledging to expand the country’s coal mining industry. But he also insists he will work with the international community on mitigating climate change. During a recent visit to France, Germany, and Canada, he declared, “India will set the agenda for the upcoming Conference of Parties” in Paris this fall.

Stepping away from herds of cattle, subsistence farms, and other responsibilities at home, roughly a hundred Kenyan villagers traveled overnight by bus from the Tana River Delta to Nairobi in February 2011 for a hearing at the national high court. The claimants declared that the lack of a “comprehensive land use master plan” infringed on the rights of the region’s people, and called for the prohibition of further land and resource development until such a plan was negotiated.

Until two years ago, when the National Wildlife Federation pointed out their presence, the 61-year-old steel oil pipelines running beneath the fast-flowing Mackinac Straits between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron were like nearly every other piece of North America’s energy transport network: out of sight and out of mind.

Under international law, someone who flees their country because of conflict or persecution is a refugee, but someone who flees because of inability to meet their basic household needs is not. In the case of Somalia, it is increasingly difficult to make any meaningful distinction between the two.

Half the world’s pigs – 476 million – reside in China. Increasingly prosperous consumers are eating fewer grains and demanding a more protein-rich diet, ballooning the pork industry to 15 times its 1960s-era size. In the last 30 years, Chinese demand for meat has quadrupled and China is now the largest consumer of seafood in the world.

The governance challenges of natural resource extraction are enormous. What can be done to improve natural resource governance? ECC’s Stephan Wolters talked to Peter Eigen, founder of Transparency International and chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) from 2006 to 2011.

Democracy is fickle. Many of the competing theories on the best ways to foment and consolidate plural, inclusive governance or predict its rise and fall focus on political and economic forces. Yet a small group of demographers have explored population age structure as a catalyst for and reflection of a host of changes in societies that can affect governance.

The global water wars are almost upon us!

At least that’s how it seems to many. The signs are troubling: Egypt and Ethiopia have recently increased their aggressive posture and rhetoric over the construction of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in the headwaters of the Blue Nile, Egypt’s major artery since antiquity. India continues to build new dams that are seen by its rival Pakistan as a threat to its “water interests” and thus its national security. Turkey, from its dominant position upstream, has been diverting the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and increasing water stress in the already-volatile states of Iraq and Syria.