Page 20 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2016
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DEVELOPMENT and the economy
 NEW RULES
FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE
Today’s globalised world means offshore finance, airport boutiques and high-speed Internet for some people, against dollar-a-day wages, used t-shirts, and illiteracy for others. How do these highly skewed global distributions happen,
and what can be done to counter them?1
sustainable and equitable development. This commitment led to the establishment of the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation (GovInn)
at the University of Pretoria, which in 2015−2016 expanded from a handful of researchers to over
30 staff and two offices, one at UP and the other in Cape Town. His work on rethinking development and, above all, his ambition to develop a robust critique
of conventional approaches to economic growth has continued unabated.
He is working on two new single-authored books, which will be published in 2017. The first, The World After GDP: Economics, Politics and International Relations in the Post-Growth Era, combines several streams of research into a coherent vision for a future global economy, showing the importance
of shifting the types of measurements used to understand development and prosperity. The second book, Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World Without Growth, will provide a practical roadmap
as to how to achieve wellbeing in times of low or no economic growth, with a particular focus on South Africa and Africa.
      1 Publisher’s note, 2016.
Professor Lorenzo Fioramonti, Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation (GovInn) at UP, writes that the convergence of crises, from climate change to rampant social and economic inequality, fundamentally questions the main economic paradigm based on growth in the gross domestic product (GDP). Over the past decade, his research has been focusing on new forms of political and economic governance. In 2013, he released Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the World’s Most Powerful, and in 2014, How Numbers Rule the World: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics, both published by Zed Books, London. The books stimulated a stream of research on how measurements affect development policies, social behaviours and governance at large, which is now a growing research field in political and economic studies.
In 2016, Fioramonti co-edited a volume titled New Rules for Global Justice: Structural Redistribution in the Global Economy, which tackles some of the most critical challenges facing the international governance systems, from redistribution of resources to inequality, and from new money systems to climate change and migration. The book presents a collection of thought-provoking innovations, authored by some of the world’s most innovative experts in these fields. Among several reviewers, Vandana Shiva, recipient of the Alternative Nobel Prize – Right Livelihood Award, writes: “Over the last decades corporate globalisation has imposed an economic system that has produced a world for the 1%, increased global injustice, and pushed the planet and societies to the brink. The ideas and proposals presented in New Rules for Global Justice have become an ecological and political imperative”.
Fioramonti’s research has always been grounded in the desire to provide evidence-based information to improve governance processes, and to achieve
18 | UP Research Review 2016
Aerial photo of Bloubosrand – Johnny Miller

















































































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