The Commonwealth

The Commonwealth

The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 56 independent and equal countries. It is home to 2.5 billion people, and includes both advanced economies and developing countries. 33 of our members are small states, including many island nations. Our member governments have agreed to shared goals like development, democracy and peace. Our values and principles are expressed in the Commonwealth Charter.

The Commonwealth Secretariat is the intergovernmental organisation that supports member countries to achieve the Commonwealth’s aims of development, democracy and peace. It publishes authoritative, evidence-based research and knowledge products for policymakers, academics, professionals and wider publics across the world. Our areas of focus and expertise include small and developing states; environment and climate change; democracy, law and government; and social issues concerning young people, gender, health and education.

Smart Power

Aude Jehan

Over the last decade, expensive and unpopular wars, recession, ballooning debt, and the rise of China and other regional powers have brought the limits of traditional power into focus. So far, Smart Power has been seen as the idea that an effective foreign policy must place principal reliance on a tailored synthesis of both hard and soft power and the precise mix depends on the circumstances.This timely volume underscores why "smart power" is still a clue for policymakers seeking to combine different tools within a coherent strategy. It also questions the practical and institutional challenges stand in the way of a true smart power approach. It underscores the need for the United States and Europe to pull all the levers of power and influence, including military, diplomatic, legal, cultural, energetic and technological. The authors introduce new approaches including the concept of spectral power, super-seeding the dichotomy of hard and soft power and urging the rethinking of the concept of smart power. The authors have held senior executive positions in the U.S. administration and governments in Europe.

  • Imprint: Center for Transatlantic Relations SAIS
  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9780989029445
  • Publication Date: Oct 2016
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Global Flow Security

Erik Brattberg

The Center for Transatlantic Relations and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs have brought together strategists and experienced practitioners from many different countries to explore how long-term global trends may impact the future of critical global flows–in areas such as energy, resources, IT and communications, trade, ideas, technology, finance, and illicit flows. Policy recommendations focus on how the European Union and the United States can work together to help ensure the continuity and maintenance of these critical global flows as we look towards 2030.

  • Imprint: Center for Transatlantic Relations SAIS
  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9780990772019
  • Publication Date: Dec 2014
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

A Guide to Australian White Cockatoos

Chris Hunt

  • Imprint: ABK Publications
  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9780957702417
  • Publication Date: Dec 1999
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

A Guide to Basic Health & Disease in Birds

Michael J. Cannon

  • Imprint: ABK Publications
  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9780957702455
  • Publication Date: Sep 2002
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Excellent Online Science Teaching

Frances Karels

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9780940017450
  • Publication Date: Sep 2019
  • Availability: Special order: Usually despatched within 14-18 days

Unheard Voices of the Next Generation

Sasha Toperich

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9780960012718
  • Publication Date: May 2022
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5 Working Days

Towards a Renewed Bretton Woods Agreement

Giovanni Tria

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9780960012787
  • Publication Date: Jul 2021
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5 Working Days

Identification Revolution

Alan Gelb

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781944691035
  • Publication Date: Jan 2018
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Energy & Transportation in the Atlantic Basin

Paul Isbell

  • Imprint: Center for Transatlantic Relations SAIS
  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781947661011
  • Publication Date: Nov 2017
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Domestic Determinants of Foreign Policy in the European Union and the United States

Daniel S. Hamilton

  • Imprint: Center for Transatlantic Relations SAIS
  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781947661028
  • Publication Date: Apr 2018
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Reality Check

John Nellis

Throughout the 1990's, privatization of inefficient state-owned enterprises was strongly embraced in developing and transitional economies. Little attention has gone to the distributional implications of the privatization movement, a particularly surprising oversight given the current backlash in many settings against further privatization. This book offers a comprehensive set of country-specific studies on the effects of privatization on people—winners and losers in different income, employment, and education groups. The studies analyze the changes in public tax revenue from privatized enterprises, shifts in pension and other liabilities, and changes in income of different groups. Contributors include David McKenzie (Stanford University), Dilip Mookherjee (Boston University), Gover Barja (Universidad Católica Boliviana, La Paz), Miguel Urquiola (Columbia University), Samuel Freije (Universidad de Las Américas in Puebla, Mexico), Luis A. Rivas (Ministry of Finance and Central Bank of Nicaragua), Máximo Torero, Enrique Schroth, and Alberto Pasco Font (Group of Analysis for Development [GRADE], Lima), Roberto Macedo (University of São Paulo, Presbyterian Mackenzie University, and Foundation Institute of Economic Research, São Paolo), Antonio Estache (World Bank), Michael Bleyzer and Edi Segura (SigmaBleyzer Corporation), Gary H. Jefferson, (Brandeis University), Su Jian (Brandeis and Peking Universities), Jiang Yuan and Yu Xinhua (National Bureau of Statistics, Beijing), and Malathy Knight-John and P.P.A. Wasantha (Institute of Policy Studies, Sri Lanka).

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781933286006
  • Publication Date: Oct 2005
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Overcoming Stagnation in Aid-Dependent Countries

Nicolas van de Walle

In this book, Nicolas Van de Walle identifies 26 countries that are extremely poor and grew little if at all in the 1990s. His sample excludes North Korea and countries where civil war explains some of their failure to grow (Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tajikistan and others). The 26 countries have limited infrastructure and human capital and the small size of their markets deter private savings and investment. Aid was meant to help overcome these problems, and these countries received a lot. Yet they have failed to grow. What is wrong? Is foreign aid a solution or part of the problem? What changes might make aid more effective? Given these countries require the financial and technical resources of the West, why haven't aid programs made a difference? Van de Walle blames their economic failure mostly on the venality and incompetence of their political leadership. He analyzes the contradictions and tensions faced by the aid community in poorly run countries, providing a sobering analysis of the perverse effects of aid where the politics is all wrong. Too often, resources provided by foreign aid keep the wrong government in office, and undermine adoption of economic as well as political reforms. Bad government combined with aid, in short, hurts poor countries – and particularly the poorest people in those countries. Despite good intentions, little progress has been made in implementing announced "reforms" of the aid business itself. A constituency for reform is lacking, in the donor countries and in the recipient countries, where those in power benefit from the status quo.

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781933286013
  • Publication Date: Mar 2005
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Making Markets for Vaccines

Ruth Levine

Making a commitment in advance to buy vaccines if and when they are developed would create incentives for industry to increase investment in research and development. New commercial investment would complement funding of research and development by public and charitable bodies, accelerating the development of vital new vaccines for the developing world. This report presents the proposal from theory to practice, by showing how a commitment can be consistent with ordinary legal and budgetary principles. By creating arrangements that devote the same scientific effort to diseases of the poor as we put into diseases of the rich, we can make a lasting contribution to the defeat of poverty.

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781933286020
  • Publication Date: Apr 2005
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Inexcusable Absence

Maureen A. Lewis

Girls' education, indisputably crucial to development, has received a lot of attention--but surprisingly little hardheaded analysis to inform practical policy solutions. In Inexcusable Absence, Maureen Lewis and Marlaine Lockheed propose new strategies for reaching the 70 percent of out-of-school girls who are "doubly disadvantaged" by their ethnicity, language, or other factors. The book will be an important tool for policymakers, informing interventions that can make a profound impact on the lives of the 60 million out-of-school girls.

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781933286143
  • Publication Date: Dec 2006
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days

Fair Growth

Nancy Birdsall

Until recently, students of development have put much more energy into understanding the causes and consequences of absolute poverty than of inequality. But globalization—with its new opportunities for winners and losers, and its new insecurities and competitive pressures—is changing that. Nowhere is the issue of inequality more worrying than in Latin America, the setting for many of the world's most unequal societies. This book presents a dozen ideas or "tools" meant to make life in Latin America more equitable and fair for the great majority of its people. It suggests policies and programs for making tax structures more progressive; giving small businesses a chance; protecting labor mobility and workers' rights; tackling corruption head on; and raising the levels of quality, efficiency, and equity of the education systems. Change and reform in the direction of greater fairness will require not only political leadership and technical know-how on the part of government officials and legislators, but support and input from the progressive business community, the increasingly effective and vocal civil society, and students and intellectuals.

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781933286167
  • Publication Date: Jan 2008
  • Availability: Temporarily out of stock: Usually despatched in 14-18 days

Exclusion, Gender and Education

Maureen A. Lewis

Girls have achieved remarkable increases in primary schooling over the past decade, yet millions are still not in school. In their previous book, Inexcusable Absence, Maureen A. Lewis and Marlaine E. Lockheed reported the startling new finding that nearly threequarters of the girls who are not in school belong to ethnic, religious, linguistic, racial, or other minorities. In this companion volume, they further analyze the determinants of school enrollment, completion, and learning in seven countries: the highly heterogeneous populations of Laos, China, Pakistan, India, and Guatemala and the homogeneous populations of Bangladesh and Tunisia. The authors find that in ethnically and linguistically diverse populations, minority groups—minority girls in particular— lag significantly behind the majority population in school attendance, while highly homogeneous populations like Bangladesh and Tunisia have successfully integrated girls into school on a par with boys. By increasing understanding about the major impediments to universal primary education, Exclusion, Gender and Education provides valuable new knowledge to those who are working to bring gender equity to the education systems of poor countries.

  • Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 9781933286228
  • Publication Date: Oct 2007
  • Availability: In Stock - Despatched Within 5-7 Working Days