Effective local institutions are central to society’s ability to respond to the impacts of climate change. Our capacity to adapt is dependent on a wide range of factors with complex institutional arrangements: production strategies, land and water governance, social support systems, household and gender dynamics, availability of weather and climate information, and interaction with external actors, among others. The interaction between local and national institutions is also an important, and often complex, factor.

In Ghana and the Philippines – countries where more than half of the population is under the age of 25 – two programs are teaching youth to play a critical role in their families, health, and community development. Leslie Mwinnyaa and Joan Castro discuss the innovative youth peer educator efforts of the Hen Mpoano Project in Ghana and EMPOWER in the Philippines.

Join us as we mark the Year of Water Cooperation with a discussion of tools, approaches, and mechanisms that advance global transboundary water cooperation. Over 260 watersheds are shared by two or more states, and 40 percent of the world’s population shares critical water supplies with another country. Although the world has largely avoided conflict over water, increasing population, economic, and climate change pressures could increase tensions over these shared resources making multi-country cooperation on water all the more essential.

While there has been much research on the effect of valuable natural resource extraction on a state’s domestic development (e.g., the “resource curse”), Wilson Center Fellow Jeff Colgan focuses on how natural resource extraction affects foreign policy. In 'Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War,' Colgan finds that “petrostates” – countries where revenue from oil exports exceeds 10 percent of GDP – are twice as likely to engage in inter-state conflict than non-petrostates.