The last day of the conference was fascinating. The negotiating delegates were up late last night working out the wording of the document; this morning you could tell a lot of people were worse for wear. It was the kind of thing diplomats train for. Horse-trading, side switching, and shifting alliances. They had to delay… Read More »

UNCTAD Day Four I am getting tired of the chronological format, and we’ve got a lot of days left. Today I’ll just offer up some observations: The first half of the high-level event on women in development depressed me. Heavy on platitudes and generalities, light on any real ideas. I also heard a lot of… Read More »

I started my day off with a visit to the UNCTAD exhibition hall. I wrote about it in my previous post; let’s just say it left me with some concerns. It does have a free lunch, though, which was exciting to discover. The conference offers snacks all day except for 12-3 pm, when they take… Read More »

Day two began with the Inter-Agency Cluster on Trade and Productive Capacity.  This is an inter-agency meeting that only takes place at UNCTAD. Like so many inter-agency meetings, it consisted almost entirely of agency representatives reading prewritten statements and ignoring each other. Some of the prewritten statements were genuinely very interesting, though. I made it… Read More »

So, today I went to UNCTAD. Well, not UNCTAD exactly. The pre-UNCTAD meetings. Mainly the World Civil Society Forum. Tomorrow UNCTAD officially opens, so today just had the sidecar meetings that take advantage of everyone’s presence in Doha. The first meeting I went to was on the role of tourism in sustainable development. It was… Read More »

Let’s talk about UNCTAD UNCTAD is the UN Conference on Trade and Development. Its 13th meeting starts on Saturday in Qatar, and I am here in Doha to report on it. I’ll be putting personal reflections here on this blog, and more serious reporting at UN Dispatch. If you, like most of my friends, think… Read More »

I was lucky enough to hear two Arab Civil society activists speak the other day. The Arab spring has been one of the major undercurrents of UNCTAD XIII. These speeches were different, though – they were by women. The first speaker was Zainab Salbi, Founder and President of Women for Women International. Her speech was… Read More »