Diplomacy & Defense Think Tank News

Over the past two decades, energy subsidy reforms have increasingly gained importance as mitigation measures to fight climate change. Still, many countries subsidize fossil energy consumption, and reforms are often short-lived. This paper presents harmonized cross-country data on the design of energy subsidy reforms, obtained from a structured literature review of both implemented and failed consumption subsidy reforms between 1978 and 2021. This standardized data enables the identification and validation of key design characteristics, including the motivation for reform, the use of gradual approaches, communication strategies, pricing mechanisms, and social protection measures, as well as their use in implementing reforms. The data highlight significant regional heterogeneity and emphasize the importance of context-specificity in shaping reform designs. The study also demonstrates the connection between key aspects of reform design and reform implementation, as well as associations with subsidy levels. It offers lessons for middle-income countries, especially those planning to implement carbon pricing policies. Lastly, this paper lays the groundwork for future research to explore these factors in greater detail; one avenue is to link design characteristics and political economy factors.

Hoher Baubedarf erfordert mehr Kapazitäten in der Bauwirtschaft – Arbeitskräftemangel macht Erhöhung der Arbeitsproduktivität erforderlich – Bauleistung könnte ohne Mehrbeschäftigung um rund zwölf Prozent höher liegen – Moderne Produktionsmethoden müssten dazu schneller und flächendeckender ...

Wie lassen sich gesellschaftlicher Wandel, soziale Ungleichheiten und individuelle Lebensverläufe über die Zeit hinweg verstehen? Mit dieser Frage beschäftigt sich die 11. ÖAW-STAT Lecture am 21. Oktober 2026 in Wien. Zu Gast ist Sabine Zinn, Direktorin des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) am ...

The transition to a new United Nations (UN) Secretary-General (SG) comes at a challenging moment, both for the organisation and its member states. It raises questions about how the next SG can guide the UN through volatile times and what they should prioritise amid mounting agendas and tightening budgets. It also gives member states an opportunity to reassess what they need from the UN and how they engage with it. Drawing on dis¬cussions at a convening of thinkers from across Europe, part of the Guidance and Regional Intelli¬gence for the Transition of UN Leadership project, this brief identifies key trends in Europe’s engage¬ment with the UN and lays out how the next SG can set priorities that matter to Europe and use the tools of their office to keep Europe engaged.

The challenge:
• Despite Europe’s significant financial contribu-tion, there is a perception that its influence at the UN is declining as global power shifts. Ear-marked funding still gives it consi¬der¬able say over the UN system, but its influence in formal settings is weakened by its own inconsistencies and by limited outreach to other regions.
• Europe’s interest in the UN may also be fading. Domestic pressures and competing crises push the organisation down the political agenda, as priori¬ties shift towards security, defence and competitiveness.

Priorities for the next SG, as seen from Europe:
• Among numerous agendas, two criteria for prioritisation emerged: (i) relevance to member states’ concerns; (ii) whether the UN can play a distinctive and valuable role.
• For Europe, this points to three areas: (i) peace and security, with the UN contributing to a future peace process and post-war reconstruction in Ukraine; (ii) migration, for which the UN offers a multilateral framework to tackle root causes such as conflict, climate change and global inequality over the long term; (iii) AI governance, where the UN can bring fragmented initiatives together and ensure they complement rather than compete with or duplicate one another.
Recommendations:
• Delivering on these priorities depends not on new mandates or processes – these should be avoided – but on the SG making better use of existing tools, such as their good offices function, their convening power and agenda-setting and their willingness to take political risks. It also depends on adequate financing by member states and on their political support.
• For Europe, the SG should lead with a strategy linked to issues salient to European audiences, act as a bridge-builder between Europe and other regions, and work with Europe’s interests at the UN, including demonstrating how sharing power and supporting a more equitable UN could serve both Europe and other regions in the long term.
 

The transition to a new United Nations (UN) Secretary-General (SG) comes at a challenging moment, both for the organisation and its member states. It raises questions about how the next SG can guide the UN through volatile times and what they should prioritise amid mounting agendas and tightening budgets. It also gives member states an opportunity to reassess what they need from the UN and how they engage with it. Drawing on dis¬cussions at a convening of thinkers from across Europe, part of the Guidance and Regional Intelli¬gence for the Transition of UN Leadership project, this brief identifies key trends in Europe’s engage¬ment with the UN and lays out how the next SG can set priorities that matter to Europe and use the tools of their office to keep Europe engaged.

The challenge:
• Despite Europe’s significant financial contribu-tion, there is a perception that its influence at the UN is declining as global power shifts. Ear-marked funding still gives it consi¬der¬able say over the UN system, but its influence in formal settings is weakened by its own inconsistencies and by limited outreach to other regions.
• Europe’s interest in the UN may also be fading. Domestic pressures and competing crises push the organisation down the political agenda, as priori¬ties shift towards security, defence and competitiveness.

Priorities for the next SG, as seen from Europe:
• Among numerous agendas, two criteria for prioritisation emerged: (i) relevance to member states’ concerns; (ii) whether the UN can play a distinctive and valuable role.
• For Europe, this points to three areas: (i) peace and security, with the UN contributing to a future peace process and post-war reconstruction in Ukraine; (ii) migration, for which the UN offers a multilateral framework to tackle root causes such as conflict, climate change and global inequality over the long term; (iii) AI governance, where the UN can bring fragmented initiatives together and ensure they complement rather than compete with or duplicate one another.
Recommendations:
• Delivering on these priorities depends not on new mandates or processes – these should be avoided – but on the SG making better use of existing tools, such as their good offices function, their convening power and agenda-setting and their willingness to take political risks. It also depends on adequate financing by member states and on their political support.
• For Europe, the SG should lead with a strategy linked to issues salient to European audiences, act as a bridge-builder between Europe and other regions, and work with Europe’s interests at the UN, including demonstrating how sharing power and supporting a more equitable UN could serve both Europe and other regions in the long term.
 

The transition to a new United Nations (UN) Secretary-General (SG) comes at a challenging moment, both for the organisation and its member states. It raises questions about how the next SG can guide the UN through volatile times and what they should prioritise amid mounting agendas and tightening budgets. It also gives member states an opportunity to reassess what they need from the UN and how they engage with it. Drawing on dis¬cussions at a convening of thinkers from across Europe, part of the Guidance and Regional Intelli¬gence for the Transition of UN Leadership project, this brief identifies key trends in Europe’s engage¬ment with the UN and lays out how the next SG can set priorities that matter to Europe and use the tools of their office to keep Europe engaged.

The challenge:
• Despite Europe’s significant financial contribu-tion, there is a perception that its influence at the UN is declining as global power shifts. Ear-marked funding still gives it consi¬der¬able say over the UN system, but its influence in formal settings is weakened by its own inconsistencies and by limited outreach to other regions.
• Europe’s interest in the UN may also be fading. Domestic pressures and competing crises push the organisation down the political agenda, as priori¬ties shift towards security, defence and competitiveness.

Priorities for the next SG, as seen from Europe:
• Among numerous agendas, two criteria for prioritisation emerged: (i) relevance to member states’ concerns; (ii) whether the UN can play a distinctive and valuable role.
• For Europe, this points to three areas: (i) peace and security, with the UN contributing to a future peace process and post-war reconstruction in Ukraine; (ii) migration, for which the UN offers a multilateral framework to tackle root causes such as conflict, climate change and global inequality over the long term; (iii) AI governance, where the UN can bring fragmented initiatives together and ensure they complement rather than compete with or duplicate one another.
Recommendations:
• Delivering on these priorities depends not on new mandates or processes – these should be avoided – but on the SG making better use of existing tools, such as their good offices function, their convening power and agenda-setting and their willingness to take political risks. It also depends on adequate financing by member states and on their political support.
• For Europe, the SG should lead with a strategy linked to issues salient to European audiences, act as a bridge-builder between Europe and other regions, and work with Europe’s interests at the UN, including demonstrating how sharing power and supporting a more equitable UN could serve both Europe and other regions in the long term.
 

Nearly 19.2 million people in Afghanistan are projected to face acute food insecurity this winter due to funding shortages, Anadolu Agency reported citing the UN humanitarian affairs office.

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At least 12 children, some as young as two, were reportedly killed in two separate incidents in Sudan's West Kordofan and Khartoum states in recent days.

UN humanitarians said Monday they are alarmed by reports of continued deadly drone strikes across Sudan, which are killing civilians and disrupting essential services, according to Xinhua.

Honourable Members,

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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus condemns the decision of the Libyan Parliament to approve the illegal Turkish-Libyan "mou" of 2019.

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Was in der Arktis klimatisch, wirtschaftlich und militärisch geschieht, ist von enormer Bedeutung für Europa - dieser Erkenntnis will die EU nun Taten folgen lassen. Heute will sie eine Strategie für die Region vorstellen.

The European Union (EU) conditions access to its market on compliance with human rights, labour standards, and environmental policy and regulation. Its trade-related legislation falls into two categories: measures addressing partner governments and measures targeting the private sector. Within these two groups, only the first includes an instrument that specifically mentions democracy, namely the essential elements clause, which appears frequently in EU trade agreements yet has been invoked only once since 2014.
The EU is under domestic political pressure to deregulate in order to strengthen its competitiveness. The competitiveness agenda is cutting into the instruments the EU already has, especially amid geopolitical competition with China, making suspensionled conditionality against partner governments harder to enact. Our recommendations are as follows:

• Democracy protection stakeholders should shift their attention from suspension-led demo¬cracy support and conditionality aimed at partner governments towards the rules and incentives that run through the private sector. Even after the Omnibus reform’s narrowing scope, firm-facing rules remain in place. They are default-on and run through existing regulatory arrangements, and their potential geopolitical repercussions are smaller in comparison.
• Tender processes are one particular set of firm-facing rules. With the momentum behind the European Commission’s legislative proposal to revise the public procurement directive, corruption-based exclusion rules should be applied against operators linked to state capture in partner countries, as democratic backsliders often use public procurement to consolidate patronage networks.
• Firm-facing regulations also permit a different case to be made: stronger due diligence carries no measurable competitiveness penalty. Companies are not just subjects of regulation. They are also stakeholders with their own interest in transparent procurement and predictable rules. To bolster such a narrative, development cooperation should invest in developing compliance capacity, especially in autocratising states.
 

The European Union (EU) conditions access to its market on compliance with human rights, labour standards, and environmental policy and regulation. Its trade-related legislation falls into two categories: measures addressing partner governments and measures targeting the private sector. Within these two groups, only the first includes an instrument that specifically mentions democracy, namely the essential elements clause, which appears frequently in EU trade agreements yet has been invoked only once since 2014.
The EU is under domestic political pressure to deregulate in order to strengthen its competitiveness. The competitiveness agenda is cutting into the instruments the EU already has, especially amid geopolitical competition with China, making suspensionled conditionality against partner governments harder to enact. Our recommendations are as follows:

• Democracy protection stakeholders should shift their attention from suspension-led demo¬cracy support and conditionality aimed at partner governments towards the rules and incentives that run through the private sector. Even after the Omnibus reform’s narrowing scope, firm-facing rules remain in place. They are default-on and run through existing regulatory arrangements, and their potential geopolitical repercussions are smaller in comparison.
• Tender processes are one particular set of firm-facing rules. With the momentum behind the European Commission’s legislative proposal to revise the public procurement directive, corruption-based exclusion rules should be applied against operators linked to state capture in partner countries, as democratic backsliders often use public procurement to consolidate patronage networks.
• Firm-facing regulations also permit a different case to be made: stronger due diligence carries no measurable competitiveness penalty. Companies are not just subjects of regulation. They are also stakeholders with their own interest in transparent procurement and predictable rules. To bolster such a narrative, development cooperation should invest in developing compliance capacity, especially in autocratising states.
 

The European Union (EU) conditions access to its market on compliance with human rights, labour standards, and environmental policy and regulation. Its trade-related legislation falls into two categories: measures addressing partner governments and measures targeting the private sector. Within these two groups, only the first includes an instrument that specifically mentions democracy, namely the essential elements clause, which appears frequently in EU trade agreements yet has been invoked only once since 2014.
The EU is under domestic political pressure to deregulate in order to strengthen its competitiveness. The competitiveness agenda is cutting into the instruments the EU already has, especially amid geopolitical competition with China, making suspensionled conditionality against partner governments harder to enact. Our recommendations are as follows:

• Democracy protection stakeholders should shift their attention from suspension-led demo¬cracy support and conditionality aimed at partner governments towards the rules and incentives that run through the private sector. Even after the Omnibus reform’s narrowing scope, firm-facing rules remain in place. They are default-on and run through existing regulatory arrangements, and their potential geopolitical repercussions are smaller in comparison.
• Tender processes are one particular set of firm-facing rules. With the momentum behind the European Commission’s legislative proposal to revise the public procurement directive, corruption-based exclusion rules should be applied against operators linked to state capture in partner countries, as democratic backsliders often use public procurement to consolidate patronage networks.
• Firm-facing regulations also permit a different case to be made: stronger due diligence carries no measurable competitiveness penalty. Companies are not just subjects of regulation. They are also stakeholders with their own interest in transparent procurement and predictable rules. To bolster such a narrative, development cooperation should invest in developing compliance capacity, especially in autocratising states.
 

Conservation needs reform as current approaches have failed to halt biodiversity loss. Increasingly, environ¬mentalists are questioning whether market-based approaches and conventional policy instruments, particu¬larly protected areas, can make a substantial contribution towards mitigating the bio¬diversity crisis. Moreover, serious concerns about their equity and justice implications have been voiced by indigenous rights organisations, peasant movements and scholars.
In light of these concerns, this policy brief provides a number of suggestions on how to make biodiversity conservation more just, equitable and effective. It builds on discussions held during the sixth Enjust Conference “Offsetting Justice? Environmental justice in the age of market and militarized con¬servation”, which took place in Bonn from 3 to 5 December 2025. The conference brought together environmental justice scholars, political ecologists, activists as well as development and conservation practitioners from around the globe. 
Our reflections and proposals support policymakers, members of parliament, conservation practitioners, and Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IP&LCs) at the local and regional levels in initiating reforms of the protected area system and other conservation mechanisms for more effective, trans¬parent and fair protection.

Key messages:
• Just conservation: Conservation policies that contribute to environmental justice have the greatest potential to achieve long-term, sustainable and legitimate conservation outcomes for people and the planet.
• Land rights-based conservation: Land rights reconfigure power relations and are a key pre¬requisite for environmental justice. Collective land titles such as Colombia’s Peasant Reserve Zones (ZRCs) are a promising instrument.
• Towards distributive justice by reforming conservation finance: IP&LCs should benefit more directly from forest, climate and biodiversity funding and should have a say in how money is spent in their communities. IP&LC-led funds and designated funding windows for IP&LCs are promising options.
• Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC): We suggest BINC as a promising measure to improve the livelihoods of IP&LCs and to overcome the transactional logic of market-based instruments. BINC compensates for past environmental injustices and enables recipients to make land-use decisions that are less influenced by precarity and market forces.
 
Professor Dr Fernanda Figueroa currently works at the Facultad de Ciencias, Departamento de Ecología y Recursos Naturales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Dr Lasse Loft is a senior scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Müncheberg, Germany.
Professor Dr Maano Ramutsindela is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cape Town and the UP-UCT Future Africa Research Chair in Sustainability Transformations at the University of Pretoria and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. 
Georg Buchholz is team leader of the International Forest Policy sectoral project at GIZ, Germany.
Dr Juan Sebastián Vélez Triana is a postdoctoral researcher with the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS / UCLouvain, Belgium, and a research associate at the Centre for Alternatives to Development (CEALDES), Colombia. 
Professor Dr Florian Dünckmann heads the Cultural Geography Research Group in the Department of Geography at Kiel University, Germany.
Dr Ina Lehmann is assistant professor of Governance of Global Biodiversity at the Environmental Policy Analysis section at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Professor Dr Silja Klepp is professor of Human Geography at Kiel University, Germany.
Dennis Schüpf is a PhD student in the Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Germany.
Anne Rose Atkins is a doctoral candidate in the Social Geography of Coastal and Marine Areas working group at the Geography Department of Kiel University, Germany.
Dumisani Chirambo is the founder of Seeds of Opportunity in Malawi. 
Felice Diekel is a PhD candidate at the Department of Civil Engineering & Management at the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.
Salome Gikonyo is part of the coordination team of the EnJust Network for Environmental Justice, Germany. 
Dr Rina Mardiana is a lecturer in the Human Geography Study Program, Faculty of Social Sciences and Human Ecology, at IPB University in Bogor, Indonesia.
Dr Adnan Mirhanoğlu is an F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral researcher at the Centre d’Études de la Coopération Internationale et du Développement (CECID), Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.  
Kim Nierobisch is part of the coordination team of the EnJust Network for Environmental Justice, Germany. 
Kelly Peña is a PhD student at the Institute of Geography, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.
Professor Dr Prakash C. Tiwari works at the Centre for Ecology Development and Research in Dehradun, India.