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Anniversaries always present an opportunity to look back. But today, as we commemorate the establishment of the United Nations on 24 October 1945, we must not focus solely on past lessons and progress. We must also consider the potential of a UN that is being revitalised to respond to a world vastly...

The situation in Catalonia is critical, given that its drive for independence is opposed by the Spanish authorities. The Catalan government calls for dialogue - but the Spanish government makes it conditional on compliance with the Spanish constitutional and legal system. The commission refuses to i...

In the world of science reporting, researchers are rightly afraid of being misinterpreted — but journalists are equally frustrated by a lack of clear data to write their articles. One way to break the deadlock is to build trust and partnerships across the ‘media divide’. Partnerships based around da...

Today is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, and in homage to his philosophy and strategy of non-violence, the UN has marked it as the International Day of Non-Violence. In India, the countdown has also begun for 2 October 2019, the target date set to attain the Swachh Bharat or Clean India Mission (SBM). Th...

‘Public Policy & Governance Beyond Borders’ was the guiding theme of the international conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), held in Brussels on 13-14 July 2017. Our sixth post in the series looks briefly at the universal human right to education —...

The Joint Research Centre is quite a unique institution at international level: we produce scientific studies and reports that feed into the work of colleagues in other Directorates-General – who in turn are responsible for designing EU Regulations and Directives. We contribute to the policymaking p...

We recently caught up with Dr. Andrea Franco-Correa of Colombia, who graduated from our PhD programme in January 2017. She defended her thesis ‘On the measurement of multidimensional poverty as a policy tool: The case of Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru’ — and has since started work at the Colombia...

Students on our Master of Science (MPP) programme were asked to write a critical opinion on the protection of human rights and development. Focusing on the means and measures available to international actors — from political mediation, to the International Criminal Court (ICC), to the Interna...

Education policies for the transition and integration of immigrant students are increasingly important in ethnically diverse countries like Canada. Yet the ability to support children’s integration varies greatly across countries, linked to a wide-range of national and regional characteristics. The ...

‘Public Policy & Governance Beyond Borders’ was the guiding theme of the international conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), held in Brussels on 13-14 July 2017. In this fifth  post in the series, Dr. Mindel van de Laar and Ayla Bonfiglio ask how the ev...

Strangers who share one car. A network around a drug addicted youth who offer care themselves, under the guidance of a professional. A person paying back an hour of painting window frames with an hour of working in someone else’s garden. These are all examples of a more social economy, which is grow...

Maastricht University (UM) celebrated the opening of the academic year on Monday 4 September 2017 by asking the question: ‘Can academics change the world?’ During the morning symposium, focusing on the action research approach in academic disciplines, six (all female) students (three Master’s and th...

  A joint post by Rushva Parihar and Dorcas Mbuvi. … An estimated 2.4 billion people still do not have access to proper sanitation, of which about 1 billion still defecate in the open. These figures represent the enormous challenge of achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 and its spec...

The APPAM International Conference 2017 lived up to its theme of ‘Public Policy and Governance Beyond Borders’ – not least thanks to the academics, analysts, practitioners and students who joined from all around the world. I had the opportunity to present a paper on ‘Metropolitan Governance Cooperat...

Poverty rates have halved in recent decades: from 1.9 billion to 836 million people, mainly thanks to economic growth in countries like China and India. Nonetheless, more than 800 million people are still living on less than US$1.25 a day. In some regions, like Sub-Saharan Africa, the absolute numbe...

Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico were Latin America’s big winners in the 2017 edition of the Global Innovation Index (GII), which ranks the world’s economies on their innovative capabilities (innovation inputs) and measurable results (innovation outputs)....

When the so-called refugee crisis reached a peak in 2015, the German Development Agency (GIZ) started a new line of investigation: checking the links between corruption, migration and forced displacement. The investigations have a clear gender angle, reflecting the depths of suffering faced by migra...

Prof. Luc Soete will address an informal meeting of EU ministers in Tallinn, Estonia, on 25 July 2017. Seeking to improve the coherence and openness of EU research and innovation partnerships, he joins speakers including Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, and ...

Social protection is not only a human right — in the long term it also boosts economies, says Prof. Franziska Gassmann, as she takes up her new Chair in ‘Social Protection and Development’ at Maastricht University. Below she explains why and how social protection works, and how much more needs...

Due to US pressure, the UN General Assembly has voted to cut $600 million from the UN Peacekeeping budget. The impact on women and girls must be addressed, or the cuts could cause serious harm, say PhD fellows Ortrun Merkle and Diego Salama. Women walk past UN peacekeepers at South Darfur’s At...