Conference Program

The WEF nexus perspective establishes the centrality of water resources for various societal activities, as well as for the provision of ecosystem services. In this sense, water resources are understood as a key element for promoting water, energy and food security. This context becomes even more sensitive due to climate change, which leads to the occurrence of extreme events and changes in rainfall patterns. Three countries are highly relevant in this discussion in view of the presence of some of the largest river basins in the world in their territories: Brazil, with the Amazon and Prata basins; China and India, which share the Indus and Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna river basins. The objective of this paper is to identify how each of these countries promotes water resources governance in these basins and whether their actions take into account the WEF nexus, considering also the increase of the climate change problem. Our methodology involves an analysis of documents made available by sectors dedicated to the topic in each country, focusing on indicators related to water governance that form the WEF nexus. Our working hypothesis is that the domestic governance structures of the countries in relation to the selected basins allude to elements of the WEF nexus, but in a fragmented way, which results in ineffective action that does not interconnect these security spheres.

The increase of the share of women in political positions appears as an almost universal goal. International Organizations play an important role in promoting this goal. However, if they really have an effect on the descriptive and substantive political representation of women is an open question. We use a most-likely case to test of IOs can influence representation: The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) as the most encompassing global parliamentary body. It promotes gender-equality policies and empowers the representation of female national parliamentarians (MPs) among its country members. Based on a “locking-in” assumption, we hypothesize that IOs can influence gender representation only in emerging democracies and anocracies, but not in liberal democracies and autocracies. We use the gender composition of all 156 national delegations in the IPU’s biannual assemblies from 2011 until 2023 to test our claims. Our time series results show that better female representation in international meetings indeed increase subsequent female representation in international and national contexts (descriptive representation). However, we hardly find evidence that this representation leads to more domestic legislation in support of women issues (substantive representation). The findings of this paper contribute to the ongoing discourse on effective gender-mainstreaming strategies to address disparities in political representation, offering implications for future policies aimed at fostering inclusive and diverse political landscapes globally.

Technology is central to contemporary discourses of global affairs, in academia as much as in practice. Whether we consider the environment or economics, culture and societal processes, or even education and the arts, science and technology are now omnipresent participants in narratives of world politics (Mayer & Acuto, 2015).

In the opening of the 78th UN General Assembly, Secretary-General António Guterres spoke about the democratic crisis and the challenges posed by technology. Hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories on social media platforms are spread and amplified by AI, undermining democracy and fueling violence and conflict in real life. In this sense, regulation and governance spaces of AI are on the global agenda.

The main risks are not new, but there is a fear of their deepening and loss of control. The agency of both the subject and AI is at the center of the debate. Therefore, what are the catastrophic scenarios represented in the media? What are the political/democratic risks envisaged at the global level? It is argued that, given that governance mostly occurs behind closed doors between states, along with the black boxes of AI technologies, it is important to recognize the visions of risks in media coverage because it is on these visions that the spaces of governance and regulation are built. In these sense, it is worthily to analyze, How democratic risk expectations are represented in western news in the coverage of AI?