Climate Change and Development Framings: A Comparative Analysis of the Human Development Report 2007/8 an the World Development Report 2010

The Human Development Report 2007/8 (HDR) and the World Development Report 2010 (WDR) are both devoted to the connections between climate change and development. The reports provide very different perspectives on where the key challenges reside. Their policy proposals are also different, but much less so. The paper investigates these dissimilarities and similarities, and explores the framings in the Overviews of the two reports. It compares their conceptions of development, their normative content, the role given to human rights, and the status of proposed market solutions to issues of climate change and development. It ends by asking why, when the problem framings so significantly differ, the proposed solutions differed far less.