Symposium Posts

The essay also emphasizes the importance of leveraging regional initiatives. These initiatives provide a complementary layer to global frameworks by fostering context-specific solutions, enhancing coordination among member states, and facilitating the exchange of best practices. For instance, regional bodies could play an essential role in mediating disputes between creditors and debtors and advocating for equitable treatment of African nations in multilateral debt restructuring forums. The Convention would cure this by institutionalizing capacity-building programs through regional debt advisory centers equips nations with the tools to circumnavigate complex debt negotiations.

The Elements Paper and the Zero Draft present an opportunity for meaningful debt governance reforms, yet their reaffirmation of the IMF’s central role perpetuates the marginalisation of Africa in financial decision-making. This blog has made calls for a transformative approach that decouples debt governance from the Bretton Woods institutions and centres it within the United Nations. A truly inclusive and equitable debt architecture requires decentering the IMF, establishing an independent Global Debt Authority hosted within the UN, and reforming debt sustainability assessments to reflect the needs and priorities of Africa. Without these changes, African debt-dependent economies will continue to face unjust financial constraints, limiting their capacity to achieve sustainable development goals.

In their current form, the proposals in the Elements Papers and the Zero Draft inadequately cover the complex and interconnected issues of climate finance and debt distress, which are crucial for realizing sustainable development in Africa. Therefore, the framework should leverage grant-based climate finance to avoid perpetual concession loans. Unlike loans, grants do not add to the already rising debt burden but instead offer a more stable and sustainable avenue to finance climate action. This will be important to break the vicious cycle of "borrow-and-under-develop" that continues to hold Africa back from realizing both its climate and development aspirations.

This symposium aims to provide a platform for African voices to engage with and critique these foundational proposals. Bringing together perspectives from undergraduate and postgraduate students and early career researchers, the symposium reflects the intellectual dynamism of African youth contributing to global financing debates. These contributions underscore the necessity of ensuring Africa’s priorities and perspectives are central to the FfD4 agenda.

In this analysis, migration and its relation with climate change and development are examined through Sen's (1999) capabilities framework for human mobility. Migration is a people-centric activity where one may want to reside in or relocate to a desired area. Discussions around the connection between climate change and migration are growing in academic and governance contexts. Scholars are increasingly recognising migration's role as a strategy for adaptation and development. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) suggests that there is no direct relation between climate changes and migration decisions. Viewing migration as merely adaptation can understate the varied causes of forced migration, which include sociology, economics, politics, and ecology. Addressing climate migration effectively requires considering political and economic processes and their interrelations.

Traditionally, the world of international cooperation has been split in a binary, where refugee responses and the creation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were situated in the humanitarian action field, with the consequence that help provided to refugees was reduced to specific situations of short-term displacement, assuming that the initial situation would eventually resolve and refugees would be able to go back to their countries of origin. For many crises, however, this has not been the case, given their complexity and scale. These ‘protracted’ crises, despite the language of urgency, have been at the centre of the humanitarian stage for decades. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the longest protracted situation are the more than 2.4 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan, but the situation of Syrian, South Sudanese, Somalis, Sudanese, Congolese or Eritrean refugees also qualifies as ‘protracted’, according to the definition that the UNHCR has been employing since 2004. The evidence of this long-term persistence of crises has been the search for durable solutions, which have been traditionally three: resettlement in another country, voluntary repatriation to the countries of origin and local integration. Yet, these solutions have not been curated by refugees themselves, but rather from the interests of the so-called ‘developed’ nations or the Global North, who have established the policies of the UNHCR through its governing body, the Executive Committee (ExCom).

Refugees as a particularly vulnerable group have increasingly found their way into recent discussions in philosophy, public policy, law, judicial decisions, etc. In fact, the Global Compact on Refugees aims to present a preliminary version of the importance of refugees in contemporary ideas of human agency-based development. Building on this, I propose that deeper engagement through a refugee lens must underlie two interlinked conceptions that are informing law and policy on various rights issues, i.e., ‘human dignity’ and a human capability-based development theory, the Capability Approach (CA). These conceptions are relevant since they have been reifying the way development is viewed to simultaneously address global issues and promote human agency. Yet, till now, even these two ideas are confronted by a (non)citizenship blind spot, particularly in relation to refugees. Thus, I wish to emphasise that the complementary understanding of dignity and CA needs to incorporate the category of ‘refugees’ to be fully coherent as theories of development. I particularly utilise Martha Nussbaum’s foregrounding on dignity in her theory of the CA to highlight its relevance yet the need for further work to include the legally ‘non-citizen’ refugee who does not neatly fit into the idea of nation states and the closely connected citizenship paradigm.

It has been 25 years since Sen’s seminal book “Development as Freedom” was published. A lot has changed since then, also in terms of how we tend to perceive the relationship between migration and development. For one, and to paraphrase Sen, migrants have begun to be perceived as “responsible persons” who “chose to act one way rather than other”. To migrate, or to stay. This reasoning is reflected in the recent work of, among others, Hein de Haas (2021) and Kerilyn Schewel (2020), who perceive migration – or lack thereof – as a result of people’s aspirations both in terms of their right to move (de Haas) and to stay (Schewel). Importantly, as argued by the latter, a systematic neglect of the causes and consequences of immobility – i.e. of people’s staying preferences – obscures any efforts to understand why, when, and how people migrate. By developing the aspirations-capabilities frameworks to explore the determinants of (im)mobility, de Haas and Schewel have contributed a great deal to altering the status quo in migration research, which has often focused on the more easily quantifiable, economic factors underlying migration decision-making. Importantly, unlike most mainstream theories of migration, the aspirations-capabilities framework becomes even more relevant when acknowledging the highly gendered nature of migration.

The symposium brings together four contributions by four distinguished authors. The contributions articulate both the potential and pitfalls of the aspirations/capabilities model of the nexus and highlight particularities when the framing is applied together with other layers (gender, climate crisis, refugees). Two of the contributions discuss their topic using the term “migration” while others look into the issue in the context of “refugees.” Notwithstanding the importance of the distinction between “migrants” and “refugees” in current global frameworks, the purpose here is to stimulate debate that goes beyond this fluid dichotomy. In popular parlance, the term “refugees” is used to connote “migrants” or “non-citizens” in general.

In many African countries, the protection and promotion of human rights is enshrined in national laws including domestic constitutions, policies, and guidelines. Many African countries are signatories to a plethora of conventions on human rights including the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. However, in several African countries, ordinarily, socio-economic rights are not enforceable because socio-economic rights are not explicitly provided in many national constitutions. Furthermore, right to research as an evolutive and burgeoning framework in the African copyright system adds to this mix. Scholars including Okorie have advocated for the development of the right to research as a complete or explicit defence to copyright infractions or as user rights. However, the development of an explicit right to research in the African copyright context is afflicted with a plethora of obstacles. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has further restricted access to information and academic materials especially in digital formats and furthermore, many African libraries and institutions are ill-equipped to perform their role of enabling access to information. Hence, this recent book – The Right to Research in Africa: Exploring the Copyright and Human Rights Interface by Desmond Oriakhogba is an important and innovative addition to this debate. Oriakhogba argues for a reconceptualization of the African copyright system from explicit human rights law perspectives as means of localising the right to research in the African context.