It’s been a long time since I did a jargon of the day post. Years, maybe. Today, though, I offer you a list of useful geographic slang for international development concepts. That doesn’t really make sense, I know. Just skip to the list; you’ll see what I mean:
Geneva Conventions: Govern international law on the treatment of victims of war.
Warsaw Convention: Protects your luggage during air travel, or more accurately, protects airlines from liability for your luggage.
Vienna Convention: Treatment of diplomatic representatives while overseas – aka why USAID cars can’t be stopped by the police unless they want to be.
Copenhagen Convention: 2009 UN agreement on climate change.
Copenhagen consensus: A list of efficient ways to spend development aid, produced by a think-tank in Copenhagen.
Paris declaration: Widely ignored agreement on better donor coordination of aid.
Cairo: The program of action agreed to at the 1994 international conference on population and development. Represented a major shift from thinking about population numbers to thinking about reproductive health.
Alma-Ata: 1978 conference that produced the Alma-Ata declaration which affirmed the importance of primary health care in achieving “health for all.”
Accra Accord: 2008 commitment to promoting south-south trade among developing countries.
Accra Agenda for Action: Widely ignored follow-up to the Paris declaration.
Mexico City Policy: Also known as the global gag rule, an intermittent US government policy that forbade any entity getting US funding from promoting, providing, or even discussing abortion.
Kyoto: The Kyoto Protocol adopted by the UN in 1997 and intended to fight global warming.
These are great Alanna! I will now make sure to always ask baggage handlers at the airport if they promise to adhere to the Warsaw Convention.
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And to make things more complicated: there is also the Geneva Convention on Refugees, which is officially called the “United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees” but is often used in its shorthand form of the “Geneva Convention” — but is not part of the Geneva Conventions on humanitarian law in war.
Great, isn’t it?
Don’t forget the Washington Consensus, which describes the belief that neoliberal economic reform will solve development issues, and while it is no longer accepted as valid by many in development, it is still widely accepted as logical by the average US-American when they try to understand international relations