A Nation of Puritan Engineers, a.k.a. the USA, is singularly ill-equipped to understand something as complicated, as paradoxical, and as deeply historically rooted as Middle Eastern violence. As the heirs of the Puritans, we tend to be self-righteous in our certainty that we have the truth....

Water is becoming increasingly scarce all over the world. All indicators of water availability show that per capita supplies will continue to decline in the years ahead. A conservative recent estimate projects that 1.8 billion people will live in regions or countries with “absolute water...

In MENA, household food insecurity, which is closely related to poverty and undernourishment, is most severe in rural areas and concentrated within Iraq, Sudan, and Yemen. 25% of the MENA population may be poor and 7% undernourished. The key to increased national and household-level food...

Structural adjustment is necessary, but not sufficient for achieving sustainable long-run growth and food security at the national and household levels. The key channel of structural adjustment's impact is through improved farmer incentives. There will be fairly strong individual crop responses...

Why do “Islamic radicalsâ€â€”including the partisans of al-Qaeda and other followers of Osama bin Laden--enjoy so much sympathy in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world? This Global Policy Brief explores four socioeconomic roots of Islamic radicalism: - The multidimensional...

Improving demand management or enhancing water conservation is a complex and difficult governance problem, involving a complicated mixture of decentralization in some areas and instances (e.g., to promote greater on-farm efficiency via water-users associations) and re-centralization in others...

Few now doubt that successfully managing environmental challenges will be central to public policy in the coming century. Unless the international community can cope with transnational problems such as global warming, destruction of species and tropical rain-forests, depletion of oceanic fish...

Why do “Islamic radicalsâ€â€”including the partisans of al-Qaeda and other followers of Osama bin Laden--enjoy so much sympathy in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world? Understanding such a phenomenon is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for crafting a strategy to...

Egypt's policy on higher education, the author argues, must take account of the realities of declining government budgets and employment and increasing reliance on the private sector, which must become more competitive internationally. Education in Egypt must increase Egyptians'ability to cope...