The following post also appears today in the Center for Global Development’s blog, Views from the Center.

The security and well-being of each and every American is tied to the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders, according to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The theme of global interdependence is the bedrock of Obama’s new strategy for America’s engagement in the world, in which global development matters, a lot.

Obama unveiled his new strategy (download full strategy document, PDF, 71k) for “Strengthening Our Common Security by Investing in Our Common Humanity” at a foreign policy forum in New Hampshire last week (video footage available here and news coverage in the Concord Monitor). The new strategy explains:

The United States should provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and common humanity. We must lead not in the spirit of a patron, but the spirit of a partner. Extending an outstretched hand to others must ultimately be more than just a matter of expedience or even charity. It must be about recognizing the inherent equality, dignity, and worth of all people. It will require American leadership that leverages engagement and resources from our traditional allies in the G-8 as well as new actors, including emerging economies (e.g. India, China, Brazil and South Africa), the private sector and global philanthropy. Yet, while America and our friends and allies can help developing countries build more secure and prosperous societies, we much never forget that only the citizens of these nations can sustain them.

Obama’s strategy reiterates a promise to double U.S. foreign assistance to $50 billion by 2012 that my colleague Steve Radelet discussed in a CGD blog several months ago. Also of note are commitments to:

* Expand prosperity through investments in agriculture, infrastructure and economic growth so the benefits and burdens of globalization are shared equally and economic policy is seen as central to security policy;
* Create an Add Value to Agriculture Initiative to promote a Green Revolution in Africa in addition to other measures to increase poor farmers’ access to agricultural markets;
* Establish a $2 billion Global Education Fund for primary education to help eliminate the “global education deficit”;
* Launch a Global Energy and Environment Initiative, create an Emerging Market Energy Fund, and spur the creation of an open-source, real-time mapping system to forecast the impacts of climate change country-by-county to address climate change and other global environmental challenges;
* Lead efforts to reform the International Monetary Fund and World Bank;
* Develop a rapid response fund for societies in transition;
* Invest in global health infrastructure, including creating health care systems that train and retain health care workers; and (last but not least)
* Coordinate and consolidate the twenty-some U.S. agencies currently involved in U.S. foreign assistance (including the Millennium Challenge Account and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in a restructured and empowered U.S. Agency for International Development.

Obama was joined at the forum by his foreign policy advisers including Richard Danzig, former secretary of the Navy; Tony Lake, former national security adviser; Adm, John Hutson, former U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General; Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of human rights and foreign policy; and Susan Rice, former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs. Together they discussed these and other ideas for U.S. global engagement should Obama become the next president.

Long before Obama’s speech, the Center for Global Development and many other organizations including the ONE Campaign and Center for U.S. Global Engagement have been working to put global development onto the agenda of the 2008 presidential campaigns. This is indeed the focus of our Global Development Matters website and the documentary film footage it uses to tell the story of why global development matters for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

I encourage my CGD colleagues and others to comment further on the details of Obama’s proposals and extend my own applause for the Obama campaign’s vision and as yet uncommon commitment to addressing global development in the 2008 presidential campaigns. Sadly, Obama’s foreign policy goals are no longer the headline on his campaign website, nor did they seem to make national press coverage this weekend. Here’s hoping that other candidates, Republicans and Democrats alike, start saying as much and more about their commitment to global development and their vision for America’s role in the world, and that the media and others start taking notice.

Immigration has been a hot topic during this election season—and immigration impacts global development quite a bit. Increasing labor mobility can improve the economic conditions of both rich and developing countries.

As you may know, yesterday the Republican presidential candidates gathered for the CNN YouTube Republican Debates. Here are some highlights dealing with immigration:

Check out this playlist to see all the candidates talk about this contentious issue:

Missed the Democrats on YouTube? Here’s the recap of the CNN YouTube Democrat Debates.

Senator Barack Obama spoke at a community event in Las Vegas last month. This video highlights what he had to say about issues pertaining to global poverty.

According to an article in today’s Washington Post, the Democratic Candidates all support a plan that would bring greenhouse gas emissions down 80% from 1990s levels by 2050—and they all take a big risk. Some concerns are higher energy costs in the short term and the fact that Americans would face significant lifestyle changes, which could be unpopular with voters.

Here are some of the things the article quoted the candidates as saying:

Edwards explained to democratic primary voters, “It won’t be easy, but it is time for a president who asks Americans to be patriotic about something other than war.”

In an interview, Edwards also recognized the challenges of supporting potentially unpopular climate plans. He said, “I’d be the first to tell you: This is not necessarily the greatest political calculation….” Edwards added, “No matter what the politics are, there’s such a moral responsibility to address this issue. We’ve got to do it.”

In a speech yesterday in Iowa, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) spoke of her plans that would reduce foreign oil imports by two-thirds in comparison to current projections.

She said, “This is the biggest challenge we’ve faced in a generation — a challenge to our economy, our security, our health and our planet. It’s time for America to meet it. . . I believe America is ready to take action, ready to break the bonds of the old energy economy and ready to prove that the climate crisis is also one of the greatest economic opportunities in the history of our country. . . . It will be a new beginning for the 21st century.”

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) said in a Des Moines speech last month that rising energy costs will be mediated by new technology. He also admitted, “But at least on the front end, there’s going to be some costs, and we can’t pretend like there’s a free lunch.”

The Republican candidates are more dubious on the topic of climate change.

Former Mayer Giuliani warned, “if we try to deal with it at too hysterical a pace, we could create problems.”

So far, the only Republican candidate to be seriously addressing global warming concerns is Senator John McCain (Ariz.), who supports a 60 percent cut in greenhouse gases by 2050.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) holds that carefully handling the climate change issue is important for either party. He said in an interview that the Democrats could turn off voters with a “litigation and regulation” stance. He continued, “Then, Republican candidates are on the opposite extreme,” he added. “A candidate who’s anti-environment and denies global warming gets killed in the suburbs.”

All policy-makers need to do what’s best for global development, including supporting critical environmental issues.

Read the full article for more information on this topic.

Originally posted on Views from the Center by Ruth Levine:

The importance of involving communities and civil society organizations in development features prominently in the discourse of international agencies. Community involvement is vital, we hear, to reforming dysfunctional education systems, fighting disease, and overcoming corruption. But we hear much more about communities than from them.

How to reach the communities, and how to know if they have been reached? The answer, according to the Most Reverend Njongonkulu Ndungane, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, is involve churches, mosques and other religious institutions as core partners, for implementation of programs and for monitoring of the development process. In Africa, he argued in a well-attended CGD event last week, religious life is a fundamental dimension of people’s lives. Houses of worship, however humble, provide education and information, community cohesion, and defense against the vagaries of government. (See One Year After the G8 Gleneagles Summit: Implementation, African Development and the African Monitor for transcript and video of the event.) Faith-based institutions can play a vital role in promoting development, and will do so more and more, as the Archbishop implements the African Monitor, a home-grown effort to track the effects of development policies at the local level through the region’s network of religious organizations.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) made a similar point in an NPR interview in July about his call to involve religious groups in social and economic development. “We make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives,” Obama said, discussing politics and religion in the U.S. Instead, he said, people who want to make the world a better place can work collaboratively across religious perspectives to tackle hard problems of the day: the environment, urban poverty, international protection of human rights, the AIDS crisis in Africa and many others. Instead of being distracted by the political use of religion as a source of division, Obama said, “we need to forge some working coalitions that actually get some things done.”

After years of ideologically polarized debates about religion in public policy - both within the U.S., and in relations between the U.S. and the developing world - it is refreshing to hear such constructive discussions about how spiritual and religious life and leadership can contribute, at both global and local levels.

Originally posted on Views from the Center by Steve Radelet:

Barak Obama’s powerful foreign policy speech in Chicago in April of this year laid out a clear vision for regaining US leadership in the world, including on critical issues confronting the poorest countries of the world. Senator Obama called for strengthening the operations of the United Nations, World Bank and other multilateral institutions to solve the world’s most pressing problems, rather than just attacking them. He also called for a doubling of US foreign assistance to $50 billion per year by 2012 to build education systems, fight disease, help build democracies, and strengthen governance systems. He made it clear why these goals are important not just for the poorest citizens of the world, but for the people of the United States.

Senator Obama was the second candidate to recognize the need for bold leadership in working alongside the poorest countries of the world, following Senator John Edwards’ call in March of this year for a significant increase in foreign assistance and a reorganization of those programs (including appointing a Cabinet-level coordinator). It was heartening to see major candidates take a clear stand early in the campaign and show strong leadership on strengthening the role of the US in working with the poorest countries of the world, not just through additional funding but by making those funds more effective in fighting poverty and by creating more economic opportunities for the poor. It is critical that the next president take steps to restore US leadership in the world, and to do so effectively will require much more than military might and figuring out what to do about Iraq.

We’re still hoping that the other candidates on both sides of the aisle follow their lead and recognize the importance of complementing military strength with stronger diplomacy and a sharper, smarter focus on fighting poverty and injustice around the world.