The framing of climate change and development: A comparative analysis of the Human Development Report 2007/8 and 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. Using a combination of frame and content analysis complemented with attention to how these institutions and their knowledge production processes operate, the paper develops a structured comparison of the problem-framing and solution-framing in the Overviews of the two reports. It compares the reports’ conceptions of development; their normative content and the roles given to human rights; the pathways and solutions the agencies defend, and how protective they are of the poor; the status given to proposed market solutions; what types of information and expert perspective are prioritized and why, and which issues are neglected. Following its stress on human rights and ethical principles, the HDR does not unsettle the market driven solutions to climate change that dominate the global policy arena. Different policy instruments and a fuller institutionalization of its human rights concerns is required, in organizations, processes, methodologies and knowledge networks that could move the ideas forward and continually press for their use. This may require a different model of report preparation.