Europe
A Cooperação Europeia para o Desenvolvimento em 2024: Desafios e perspectivas
Abstract:
In a year of European Parliament (EP) elections, and amid growing global uncertainty, the study “European Development Cooperation in 2024: Challenges and Perspectives” was created following the publication “The Future of International Development Cooperation: Fragmentation, Adaptation, and Innovation in a Changing World” (2021). In this study, we outline the latest developments in the European Union’s (EU) international development cooperation (IDC) at the institutional and policy levels, highlighting the role of the European Parliament. We also examine the relationship between Portuguese IDC and its European counterpart, emphasizing the centrality of partner countries in the Portuguese-Speaking African Countries and Timor-Leste (PALOP-TL) and the role of civil society. We conclude with reflections on the implications for European cooperation, Portuguese cooperation, and civil society given the increasing importance of geopolitics in the current global context, the political-institutional transformations observed in European IDC, and the likely configuration of the EP for the new legislature, where it is expected that political forces opposing development cooperation will be strengthened.
Cite this ebook:
Bernardo, Luís Pais, Luís Mah e Ana Luísa Silva (2024). A cooperação europeia para o desenvolvimento em 2024 : desafios e perspectivas. Lisboa: Plataforma Portuguesa das ONGD
A certificação de sustentabilidade na Indústria Têxtil Portuguesa: um estudo exploratório
Abstract:
This study analyzes sustainability certification in the Portuguese textile industry. The main objective is to map the current landscape of sustainable practices adopted by this crucial sector of the Portuguese economy, evaluating the implications, challenges, and benefits of certification in the contemporary economic and environmental context. We aim to understand how sustainability certifications can serve as a strategic tool to boost the competitiveness of Portuguese companies in the global market, responding to the growing demand for ethical and environmentally conscious products.
The methodology employed in this study involves a review of the existing literature on sustainability in the textile industry. Essentially, it is a hybrid and comparative analysis, utilizing the complete universe of certified Portuguese textile companies. While this focused approach does not answer all questions, it allows this study to take a small step towards research committed to supporting companies that, despite clear risks and costs, choose to invest in sustainability. It also addresses the societal pressure that can and should be exerted on legislators to implement stronger regulatory frameworks and on companies that decide not to invest in sustainability.
This is a small step we hope will lead to further research efforts. We offer a perspective on the role of sustainability certification as a competitive differentiator for the Portuguese textile industry. The study emphasizes the growing importance of sustainability as a selection criterion for consumers and international business partners, reinforcing the need for Portuguese companies to continue investing in sustainable practices and obtaining certifications that validate their efforts. The study also presents and discusses recommendations for future policies and strategies, aiming to strengthen Portugal’s position as a leader in sustainable textile production on the global stage.
Cite this ebook:
Bernardo, Luís Pais (2024). A certificação de sustentabilidade na Indústria Têxtil Portuguesa : um estudo exploratório. Lisboa: Oficina Global.
Primeiro Passo Repensar: Um olhar sobre o consumo de moda sustentável dos jovens universitários em Portugal
Abstract:
Sustainable fashion consumption involves conscious choices in purchasing, using/maintaining, and disposing of each clothing item. Therefore, it is important to Rethink, Reject, Reduce, Repair, Reuse, and Recycle. This study aimed to understand the behaviors and environmental awareness of university students living in Portugal during the three main phases of fashion consumption. An online questionnaire survey was conducted among 271 university students aged 18 to 26. The survey was open for responses from June 15 to July 24, 2023.
Cite this ebook:
Silva, Ana Luísa e Renata Assis (2024). Primeiro passo repensar: um olhar sobre o consumo de moda sustentável dos jovens universitários em Portugal. Lisboa: FEC | Fundação Fé e Cooperação e CEsA/ISEG-UL.
Algodão, uma fibra global
Abstract:
Cotton doesn’t lie. This well-known idiom in Portugal highlights how the most important natural fiber — both historically and commercially — has woven itself into our lives. Yet, while cotton doesn’t deceive, it does conceal. It’s more than just a fiber; it’s an entire global industry. It shapes production and consumption patterns, directly impacting the lives of millions worldwide. Cotton influences the fate of soils and water sources and significantly affects the environment. It encompasses agriculture, fashion, and high technology. Cotton has a complex and often troubling history: it can be sweet, but it’s also bitter. Its soft touch belies the complexity of its life cycle, which spans from cotton fields in Burkina Faso to garment factories in Bangladesh, fashion runways in Milan, and algorithms in New York. This distribution isn’t arbitrary: the value gap —evident in the income disparity between a field worker in Burkina Faso, a factory manager in Bangladesh, and a top designer in Milan — illustrates global inequalities. Cotton connects these diverse landscapes and activities. This briefing is for anyone who wants to understand the fashion they wear and the fibers they choose. It’s also for decision-makers regulating cotton production and consumption. Responsible consumption is a key step in altering economic structures, but it’s rarely enough on its own. Our aim is clear: meaningful action requires clarity, knowledge, and information.
Cite this ebook:
Bernardo, Luís Pais (2023). Algodão, uma fibra global. Lisboa: FEC | Fundação Fé e Cooperação.
The Values of Portuguese International Development Cooperation: Review and update after 2013
Abstract:
In recent years, International Development Cooperation has assumed particular importance in scientific research and there are currently several studies of general scope or limited to a smaller geographical or thematic space, such as those that focus on national cooperation policies. In general, these works have sought not only to explain its historical, institutional and strategic evolution, but also to constitute a basis for reflection on a long journey of ideas, values and practices that it has been following and its results with partner countries. Portuguese Cooperation is no exception and, in general, all the publications that contextualize it refer directly or indirectly to the general values by which it is governed. However, there aren´t studies that identify the individual reference values of the action of the Cooperation actors in their practice of identifying, managing, and evaluating projects. In this article, we intend to identify the values considered as guiding principles of the action that the actors of the Portuguese Cooperation individually consider in the practices they develop. Such an intention constitutes a real innovation, since the only values identified so far are those that governments include in the strategies presented, more or less inspired by the documents of the European Union (EU) and the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Cite this paper:
Sangreman, Carlos e Raquel Faria (2024). ” The values of Portuguese International Development Cooperation: Review and Update after 2013″. In Recent Research Advances in Arts and Social Studies (Vol. 4), M. Camino Escolar-Llamazares (ed), 148-167. London: B P International
African women’s trajectories and the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, Ethnic and Racial Studies
Abstract:
This article compares the trajectories of different women who crossed the Casa dos Estudantes do Império (CEI), a formal institution created in Lisbon by students from the colonies with the support of the Portuguese dictatorial regime in 1944, that became a platform for anti–colonialism. Due to the role played by the CEI in the political and social paths of the leaders of African national liberation movements, historiography has privileged masculine accounts. In contrast, the roles and lives of women linked to the CEI remain unexplored or approached from a vision of “methodological nationalism”, with few exceptions. Addressing these trajectories from a transnational and “Afro–Iberian” lens and through the scrutiny of several sources allows us to reflect on a diversity of gender, race, class, and political ideology. The final aim is to illuminate some aspects of the Afro–Iberian mosaic from a gendered and postcolonial perspective.
Citation:
Jessica Falconi (2023) African women’s trajectories and the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2023.2289141
Portugal’s Inequality Regime: Many contradictions, multiple pressures
Abstract:
This paper applies the concept of inequality regime, in the tradition of the Regulation School, to the analysis of the patterns and drivers of socioeconomic inequality in Portugal in the last few decades. Key empirical patterns are identified with respect to income inequality, top and bottom incomes, wealth inequality, monetary poverty and non-commodified provision of basic goods. We then discuss several underlying processes and mechanisms, namely the capital-labour relation, classification struggles, financialisation, redistribution, and welfare, to account for the identified empirical patterns. We conclude that Portugal’s inequality regime is remarkably contradictory and argue that the country’s success in curbing most measures of inequality in recent times is especially vulnerable to a variety of pressures.
Quotation:
Abreu, A. (2023). “Portugal’s Inequality Regime: Many contradictions, multiple pressures”. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 130:127-156
De escravos a indígenas: O longo processo de instrumentalização dos africanos (séculos XV-XX)
Abstract:
De Escravos a Indígenas: o Longo Processo de Instrumentalização dos Africanos (Séculos XV-XX), which brings together a set of texts written over forty years and dispersed in publications of diverse nature, not always easily accessible, aims to contribute to a renewal of historiography on the relations between Portugal and Africa, in the specific field of the forms of instrumentalisation of Africans carried out by the Portuguese for almost five centuries. A long process, whose internal nature proved capable of metamorphosis and reconversion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ensuring the continuity of the violent ‘use’ of African populations, resorting to a new classificatory apparatus – savages, indigenous, assimilated – aimed at keeping Africans within the sphere of Portuguese domination, contributing to legitimising their enslavement and fixing distorting interpretations of History.
If a first line of study aims to review the history of slavery and slave trafficking and their ideologies in spaces of Portuguese ‘occupation’ like Angola, a second line of study privileges iconographic documents as historical sources, emphasizing their historical and informative dimension. Finally, the third line of this study seeks to highlight the evolution of the process of Portuguese instrumentalisation of Africans, which resorts to unprecedented classificatory categories – savage, indigenous, assimilated – and to practices that emerge from the slave labour of the past to ensure the colonial exploitation of African populations.
Value judgments, commodification, objectification, exploitation, ridiculing of African men fabricated Portuguese imaginaries that reduced the black/African to slavery, the savage/indigenous to lazy, thieving and drunk, the assimilated/’civilised’ to a ridiculous and negative copy of the white/Portuguese, enshrining the inferiorization of Africans, and in the same movement, glorifying the Portuguese ‘race’, hierarchizing the humanities and valuing the dimension and nature of the Portuguese actions, first slave-owning and then colonialist, that have left their mark on Portuguese society to this day.
Quotation:
Henriques, Isabel C., De Escravos a Indígenas: o Longo Processo de Instrumentalização dos Africanos (Séculos XV-XX), Lisboa, Ed. Caleidoscópio, 2019.
Effect of Battery Electric Vehicles on Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 29 European Union Countries
Abstract:
Effect of Battery Electric Vehicles on Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 29 European Union Countries explored the effect of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) on greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in a panel of twenty-nine countries from the European Union (EU) from 2010 to 2020. The method of moments quantile regression (MM-QR) was used, and the ordinary least squares with fixed effects (OLSfe) was used to verify the robustness of the results. The MM-QR support that in all three quantiles, economic growth causes a positive impact on GHGs. In the 50th and 75th quantiles, energy consumption causes a positive effect on GHGs. BEVs in the 25th, 50th, and 75th quantiles have a negative impact on GHGs. The OLSfe reveals that economic growth has a negative effect on GHGs, which contradicts the results from MM-QR. Energy consumption positively impacts GHGs. BEVs negatively impacts GHGs. Although the EU has supported a more sustainable transport system, accelerating the adoption of BEVs still requires effective political planning to achieve net-zero emissions. Thus, BEVs are an important technology to reduce GHGs to achieve the EU targets of decarbonising the energy sector. This research topic can open policy discussion between industry, government, and researchers, towards ensuring that BEVs provide a climate change mitigation pathway in the EU region.
Citação:
Fuinhas, J.A., Koengkan, M., Leitão, N.C., Nwani, C., Uzuner, G., Dehdar, F., Relva, S., Peyerl, D. (2021). Effect of Battery Electric Vehicles on Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 29 European Union Countries. Sustainability, 13 (24), 13611. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132413611
