Global Sustainable Development News

A recent special issue of Review of International Political Economy, co-edited by GSD Assistant Professor Nick Bernards, looks at the politics of emerging technologies in global finance.

New financial technologies ('fintech') have attracted growing media and policy attention in recent years, drawing both a good deal of hype about their potential benefits and concerns about the possibilities for abuse, surveillance, and instability created by new technologies. Despite this, there has remained little critical social science literature looking at the driving forces behind the promotion and adoption of fintech. This project aims to begin addressing that gap.

The issue includes eight articles touching on subjects including uses and abuses of Big Data in microcredit, digital technologies and remittances, platform lending, high-frequency trading and alternative credit data. Along with editing the collection, Dr. Bernards contributed a co-authored introductory article, and a sole-authored article on psychometric credit scoring and financial inclusion.

After 20 years working at our University, and five years leading our School, Prof Cathia Jenainati has left Warwick University to take up a role at another University.

As a colleague of tremendous intelligence and loyalty, and an extremely supportive and energetic Head of School, Cathia will be sorely missed. She has been a wonderful friend and colleague, the true backbone of our School. We wish her the very best for a successful future!

Dr Stéphanie Panichelli-Batalla has now assumed the role of the Head of School, and she is looking forward to lead GSD staff and students to further success. We believe this to be very exciting news and we wish Stéphanie well in this new phase of her academic career!

^{Image credit: Patthanan Thavethanutthanawin}

A lack of awareness is often portrayed as a key driver of irrational antibiotic use and the spread of drug resistant superbugs. A new article, led by Warwick University Assistant Professor Marco J Haenssgen, has now revealed how widespread the basic understanding of drug resistance in Southeast Asia is, and that higher levels of awareness are linked to higher antibiotic use in the general population. The researchers call for broader development policy approaches to tackle the superbug crisis.

Dr Morakinyo Adetutu will join the School for Cross-faculty Studies in September 2019 as Senior Teaching Fellow in Global Sustainable Development.

Morakinyo’s teaching spans both undergraduate and postgraduate areas of environmental and natural resource economics and global development. Morakinyo’s recent research focuses on exploring the effectiveness of energy and environmental policy, as well as the intersection of commodity markets with financial systems.

Todd Olive, a Second Year Economics and GSD Student, is now a Fellow of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA). WIHEA is the UK's first institutional academy of educators for staff and students engaged in the advancement of learning and teaching excellence. It provides an institutional platform for collective discussions on learning and teaching and on the academic student experience. Currently, its key themes are Undergraduate Research, Internationalisation and Interdisciplinarity. It is on the latest that Todd chose to focus on.

Here it is, the year is officially over and the first GSD cohort, who started at Warwick three years ago, has just graduated!

The entire Department is incredibly proud of the 75 students who are now officially Warwick GSD graduates, thrilled to have met their families and friends, and celebrated with them the students’ successes and achievements!

Global Sustainable Development hosts an annual competition for Year 12 students across the country, encouraging students to think creatively and gain valuable research skills as they learn more about global sustainable development.

We were very impressed with the quality of submissions this year, which were very well researched and well presented. The shortlisted entrants were invited to a Campus Day at Warwick on 29th June, to have a feel of what it means to be a GSD student at Warwick. The day ended with the prize giving, where the following prizes were awarded:

Best Essay: James Rennie

Best Video: Finn Deacon

On June 5th – 7th, two of our second year GSD students attended the Climate Reality Leadership training in Brisbane. Ellie Church and Hollie Ryan, currently studying at Monash, were trained along with 800 other people by Al Gore amongst other professionals, scientists, communicators and leaders. After successfully completing the training, they now join nearly 20,000 other trained leaders, and are required to complete ’10 Acts of Leaderships’ per year.

Many congratulations to Hannah Abdel-Hadi and Liam Shah, two of our GSD finalists, who have been jointly awarded one of the University's 2019 OSCAs. The awards will be presented to them at the GSD graduation ceremony, on 24th July.

A new social survey data set can be accessed free of charge for research and teaching to shine new light on antibiotic use, marginalisation, and rural treatment-seeking behaviour in Thailand and Laos. Published today on the UK Data Service platform, GSD Assistant Prof Marco J Haenssgen and his team have made available a crucial new resource for understanding the social context of drug resistance. As part of the project “Antibiotics and Activity Spaces”, the researchers completed 5,885 survey interviews that enable both provincial-level estimates and detailed village-level analyses of rural health behaviours.