Insights

In South Asia, people increasingly migrate internally from rural to urban areas to cope with climate-induced extreme weather like cyclones, floods, and droughts. While men often migrate for work, women also move due to climate stress, with roles varying by country; women tend to farm and care for livestock in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, but more women migrate for work in Bhutan. Women's control over assets and finances remains limited, except where migration enhances their economic influence and decision-making. Climate pressures exacerbate gender inequalities but can also prompt household role renegotiations, with migration reshaping labor, income control, and social dynamics. Overall, climate change drives complex shifts in migration patterns and gendered household politics.
Latin America
Who moves away when climate change hits? The hidden household politics of migration
The Russian shadow fleet, comprising up to 1,600 vessels engaged in evading oil export sanctions, finances Russia's war against Ukraine while posing growing security risks to Europe. Nearly half of Russia's oil—generating over €10 billion monthly—is shipped via the Baltic Sea, making these maritime routes vital to its economy. Beyond sanctions evasion, the fleet is increasingly linked to espionage, sabotage, and environmental hazards, serving as a tool of hybrid warfare that exploits European vulnerabilities below the threshold of open conflict. A coordinated and systematic international response, focusing on maintaining sanctions integrity, maritime security, and defense, is essential to counter this multifaceted threat effectively.
Measures Against the “Russian Shadow Fleet”
AI is being used in European procurement to detect, prevent, and investigate corruption by targeting entrenched patronage networks. These AI tools are now critical in the EU enlargement process, where candidate countries must demonstrate credible enforcement to receive pre-accession funds. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office employs AI to probe financial crimes but faces bureaucratic challenges limiting its effectiveness. Ukraine’s open-source e-procurement system Prozorro, enhanced with machine learning, is a leading example of AI-integrated anti-corruption reform that involves civil society in oversight. Albania has even appointed an AI chatbot to oversee public procurement, illustrating political willingness to experiment with AI governance. The key challenge remains political: ensuring authorities allow AI systems to act on their findings.
Financial services
AI can help tackle corruption in Europe – but only if politicians let it do its job
Green foreign direct investment (FDI) in Europe is substantially larger and more diverse than commonly measured if defined beyond just renewable energy. The EU Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities broadens the definition of green investment across sectors such as steel, chemicals, automotive, manufacturing, and services, recognizing various ways activities contribute to sustainability. Transitioning these hard-to-abate sectors requires economy-wide transformation and massive financing, where private and foreign investment plays a critical role. By applying large language models (LLMs) to analyze thousands of project descriptions against the EU Taxonomy’s technical criteria, researchers uncover a more accurate and comprehensive picture of green FDI, enabling better project design, screening, and communication.
Finland, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg
Using LLMs to uncover Europe’s green investment blind spot
Moscow faces challenges reminiscent of the USSR's decline, with Russia struggling militarily and economically amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. The humiliating May 9th Victory Day parade highlighted Kremlin difficulties, including reliance on foreign intervention to prevent Ukrainian attacks on Moscow. Ukraine's growing offensive capabilities are severely damaging Russian infrastructure, while Western support for Kyiv wanes except among Europeans. Internally, Putin's grip appears weakened, with speculation about his succession and whether he remains the true power or a figurehead. Despite these pressures, Russia remains a significant threat across military, energy, and diplomatic fronts, underscoring urgent European needs for rearmament.
What Is Happening in Moscow?
Asia and the Pacific are undergoing the largest transport infrastructure expansion in history, with annual spending in developing countries expected to rise from $800 billion to $2.6 trillion by 2035. Despite this growth, infrastructure development will still fall short of demand, leaving per-capita road and rail availability far below levels in wealthy nations. Roads will account for the largest share of spending, alongside major investments in rail and electric vehicle charging. Funding challenges persist, with public-private partnerships and aid covering only a small fraction of costs. Opportunities to raise funds include reallocating fossil fuel subsidies, expanding road user charges, leveraging real estate development for urban transit, and derisking investments through guarantees. However, achieving safe, clean, and accessible transport will require more than funding alone.
Latin America | Financial services
Asia and the Pacific’s Trillion-Dollar Transport Question: How Much, and Who Pays?
The Pacific region has made notable advances in sovereign disaster risk financing, yet there remains a need to improve the strategic use of pre-arranged financing and risk layering methods. Enhancing public financial management systems is crucial to ensure rapid, transparent, and effective fund disbursement supported by robust risk data and analytics. Expanding financial protection, improving institutional coordination, and developing sustainable insurance markets are essential to lowering contingent liabilities and boosting financial resilience amid growing climate risks. These efforts are key to strengthening disaster risk financing performance across the Pacific.
Financial services
Disaster Risk Financing in the Pacific: A Landscape Study of Systems, Instruments, and Enabling Conditions
The Philippines faces significant challenges including persistent poverty, income inequality, and frequent natural disasters that strain public finances and worsen vulnerabilities. Achieving inclusive, resilient growth and the AmBisyon Natin 2040 vision requires structural reforms and enhanced public financial management (PFM). Advancing a performance-informed PFM system that links budgeting, planning, implementation, reporting, and evaluation to actual outcomes can improve spending efficiency, transparency, and accountability. By reallocating resources towards education, health, infrastructure, and social protection, the government can better address socioeconomic disparities and build public trust, ultimately fostering sustainable development and poverty reduction.
Philippines | Health, Financial services
Spending Better: Advancing Performance-Informed PFM in the Philippines
Technological advances shift the value people place on goods, favoring human qualities as machine-produced features become abundant. Large language models (LLMs) make fluent prose cheap and common, diminishing writing's traditional premium on smoothness. Instead, the scarce value will be on provenance—texts traceable to a unique human sensibility and lived experience. Unlike other crafts, writing lacks inherent markers of authorship, as readers see only finished texts without evidence of the process or origin. This inherent anonymity poses challenges to certifying human authorship, making writing uniquely vulnerable to doubts about its authenticity despite the rising "flight-to-humanity" effect in other fields.
Education
“Human authored”? Who knows
Digital platforms face a strategic trade-off between diffusion—rapidly expanding user and provider bases to become market defaults—and differentiation—creating unique, exclusive features or content that competitors cannot easily copy. On the supply side, platforms manage content through aggregation (broad third-party offerings), curation (exclusive partnerships), or creation (owning original content), balancing growth speed against resilience. On the demand side, strategies include accumulating large user numbers, activating deeper user engagement, or fostering communities to build loyalty. Platforms must navigate these approaches to thrive, with risks such as vulnerability to imitation when focusing on diffusion and slower growth when pursuing differentiation.
Education, ICT
Digital platforms are taking part in a battle between diffusion and differentiation
Armenia is pursuing a multi-aligned foreign policy to reduce reliance on Russia while expanding strategic partnerships across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Since suspending participation in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization in 2022, Armenia has cultivated ties with the EU, France, the U.S., and countries such as Germany, the UK, and India, balancing geopolitical pressures amid regional conflicts. While maintaining some Russian economic and military links, Armenia seeks greater security flexibility and diversified alliances, navigating competing interests among global powers. This layered approach aims to enhance Armenia’s sovereignty and regional connectivity amid a complex and volatile geopolitical environment.
Armenia
Armenia’s Multi-Aligned Strategic Partnerships
Women’s health research is currently under-resourced, underprioritized, and narrowly defined, despite women facing unique health needs throughout their lives. To address these gaps, a participatory study developed a comprehensive topic map encompassing key domains, determinants, technology, and evidence gaps in women’s health. Engaging 77 global experts, the study collected 113 research questions, clustered into 56 themes, and prioritized the top ten to guide future research and innovation. Priority areas include reframing women’s health, enhancing investment and innovation, improving data quality, and ensuring equity and participation. This framework aims to unify and advance global women’s health research and policy.
Health
A Crowdsourced Topic Map and Future Research Agenda for Women’s Health
Three major European diplomatic events held in Yerevan—the European Political Community (EPC) Summit, the first Armenia-EU summit, and French President Macron's state visit—signal a significant shift in Armenia’s foreign policy after its 2023 Nagorno-Karabakh defeat. These events highlight Armenia’s growing rapprochement with Europe and its emerging role as a strategic asset for the EU in the South Caucasus, despite Azerbaijan’s role as a key gas supplier. The EPC Summit served as a crucial platform for high-level bilateral and multilateral engagements involving European and Euro-Atlantic security actors, underscoring Europe’s increased geopolitical involvement in the region. France’s diplomatic role is pivotal in anchoring Armenia within European frameworks and supporting its integration efforts.
Armenia
Armenia as a Platform for EU Engagement: France’s Role in Anchoring Armenia in Europe
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) holds significant potential to enhance integration, strengthen value chains, and boost intra-African trade. Effective implementation relies on coordinated actions at borders, corridors, and within domestic regulatory systems, with active private-sector involvement to identify and resolve operational bottlenecks. Key priorities include integrated customs processes, mutual recognition of standards, clearer domestic tax and fee policies, improved management of non-tariff barriers, and addressing geographic, infrastructure, and security challenges. These measures can lower trade costs, promote regional sourcing, and convert AfCFTA commitments into tangible economic growth and job creation.
Burkina Faso
AfCFTA Implementation: Learnings from Value Chains and Regional Blocs
South Africa withdrew its Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy 17 days after publication due to AI-generated fake research citations. This withdrawal marked the first instance of a government retracting a document over AI hallucinations. The error compromised South Africa’s historic effort to establish a formal ethics board for AI oversight. The incident highlights ongoing concerns about AI hallucinations appearing in official documents and underscores the critical need for human verification and accountability in AI-generated content.
Five times AI hallucinations embarrassed governments
More people are valuing local connections, a trend dubbed "neighborism," where proximity is seen as a crucial resource for mutual support amid rising costs and crises. Digital tools are increasingly used to strengthen nearby relationships rather than replace them. Neighborism ranges from small acts like sharing resources to organized political actions, such as Minneapolis communities mobilizing against ICE enforcement. This shift reflects a renewed emphasis on local responsibility and trust as foundational for community resilience.
Why “neighborism” is having a moment
People-centered evaluation emphasizes culturally responsive, equitable, and socially just practices by expanding evaluators' roles from impartial observers to agents of social change. It prioritizes building authentic, long-term relationships with communities, integrating culture and local context throughout evaluation processes. This approach differs from traditional program-centered evaluation by embracing evaluator positionality, fostering inclusive community engagement, and co-constructing knowledge through dialogue and participation. People-centered evaluation challenges evaluators to actively invest in communities and design evaluations that serve and empower participants, thereby advancing socially just and collaborative evaluation practices.
People-centered evaluation: Theory and Action
Generative models automate not only intellectual tasks but also a wide range of human social capacities, termed “social doing.” This framework highlights how the commodification of sociality in the digital economy enables the creation of synthetic social realities, which are shaped by privately owned, undemocratic AI systems. The analysis differentiates between “use” and “exchange” sociality, showing how generative models either replace or mediate social interactions. The concept of Synthetic Sociality reveals the privatization of social life through AI, with implications for design and governance of these technologies.
Education
Synthetic Sociality: How Generative Models Privatize the Social Fabric
Climate change is intensifying pressures on water resources in Southeast Asia by disrupting rainfall, straining supplies, and worsening floods and droughts, making adaptation essential for community, ecosystem, and economic resilience. The private sector can play a key role in financing Adaptation through Water (AtW) by creating bankable solutions that translate resilience into financial value, aggregate projects, align risk-return profiles, and implement impact measurement frameworks. Effective governance and coordination between public and private stakeholders are critical to structure investable opportunities and scale adaptation financing. The Southeast Asia Partnership for Adaptation through Water (SEAPAW), a collaboration between the World Economic Forum and Singapore International Foundation, leads efforts to implement these strategies regionally.
Health
Adaptation through Water: Scaling Private Sector Finance for Climate Adaptation in Southeast Asia
More than two-thirds of people worldwide consider democracy very important, with the primary expectation that it improves living standards and well-being, according to the Democracy Perception Index 2026. The survey of over 94,000 respondents in 98 countries reveals widespread pessimism about national directions, especially in democracies and Europe, despite strong support for democratic systems. Citizens increasingly demand that democracies deliver security, stability, and economic progress, highlighting a growing gap between democratic ideals and lived realities. Support is highest in Greece, Hungary, and Sweden, and lowest in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.
Latin America
Survey: democracy remains popular, but citizens expect better results

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