China is so wonderful! I love it here. The weather, the food, the city itself – everything in Kunming seems to be perfect.
Through my volunteer work with Green Watershed I am learning a lot about Green Credit, which is a policy concept that encourages banks to take up social and environmental responsibility, and include social and environmental impact assessments into their credit decision-making processes. If such policies were in place, banks would not give loans to projects that have high social and environmental risks thus making such projects impossible to implement.
The above description is, of course, a description in a nutshell. But upon my return I’m planning on writing a paper on Green Credit and (since I think I might be programmed permanently to put everything into global context) how Green Credit could be useful if implemented as an international policy, especially to developing countries (e.g., foreign companies would not be coming in and launching projects harmful to local populations and environment because they would not be funded).
In general, even though this research topic was initially far off my regular line of work and research, I think I’ll be able to tie it into thinking about sustainable development internationally. Saying that, being here has also made me think of ways international development discourse can be re-framed to the point of redefining what development itself is and ideally moving away from Western nations being the “end goal” of development for non-Western countries. It’s true what they say: traveling broadens one’s mind. I haven’t had so many fruitful ideas in a long time, now I think I don’t have enough time in university left to put everything in writing.
On a different topic, I’m blogging more often over here: http://worldtravellight.tumblr.com/ so please follow if you’re interested and have a tumblr.