Jargon of the Whatever

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.