S3, E4 Jayati Ghosh on Why Inequality is the Basic Driver of the Climate Crisis

Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice

National and global approaches to climate change alleviation are very inadequate because they ignore the important role played by wealth, income and consumption inequalities. Reducing these will be essential for humanity to meet the climate change — and there are feasible ways to do this.

Speaker

Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years, and since January 2021 is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. Recent books include the forthcoming co-authored book Earth For All: A survival guide for humanity; The making of a catastrophe: Covid-19 and the Indian economy, Aleph Books 2022; When governments fail: Covid-19 and the economy, Tulika Books and Columbia Univerity Press 2021 (co-edited); and Women workers in the informal economy, Routledge 2021 (edited). She has advised governments in India and other countries, including as Chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Commission on Farmers’ Welfare in 2004, and Member of the National Knowledge Commission of India (2005-09). She is currently a Member of the UN Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All and the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, mandated to provide a vision for international cooperation to deal with current and future challenges.

Discussant

Kathryn Hochstetler is Professor and Head of the Department of International Development at the LSE. She teaches and researches at the intersection of environment and development issues, including teaching DV415, Global Environmental Governance. Her publications include many on topics including the participation of emerging powers in climate negotiations, the relationship of environmental issues with trade and finance, and environmental politics and policy in developing countries, especially in South America. Her most recent book is Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar Power in Brazil and South Africa (Cambridge 2021). Before that, she published the prize-winning Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Duke 2007), with Margaret Keck. Before joining LSE, she was a professor in Canada (University of Waterloo, Balsillie School of International Affairs) and the United States (University of New Mexico, Colorado State University). She is on the editorial boards of several climate and development series at Cambridge University Press, as well as multiple academic journals. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Chair

Laura Mann is a sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of development, knowledge and technology. Her regional focus is East Africa (Sudan, Kenya and Rwanda) but she has also worked on collaborative research on ICTs and BPO in Asia and has conducted fieldwork in North America as part of a project on digitisation within global agriculture.

This talk is part of the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice 2022 series, a high-profile lecture series run by the Department of International Development at LSE and organised by Dr Laura Mann and Professor in Practice Duncan Green.

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