Briefs

Guaranteed Income: Securing the Right to an Adequate Standard of Living

A guaranteed income can dramatically reduce poverty and inequality, advance gender and racial justice, and support workers. By providing direct cash assistance without onerous conditions or eligibility requirements, it can help create a more equitable future.

Oxfam America recognizes the human right to an adequate standard of living. To fulfill this right and address inequality, policymakers should support local guaranteed income initiatives and work toward a federal income guarantee. By providing unconditional cash transfers, a guaranteed income would represent a sharp break from the punitive, highly conditional, and inadequate safety net programs that allow poverty and extreme inequality to persist. It can break down the structural barriers that perpetuate racial and gender disparities and help create a more just economy.

Federal Jobs Guarantee: Fulfilling the Human Right to Dignified Work

By providing decent work to all who seek it, a federal jobs guarantee could reduce poverty and inequality, advance gender and racial justice, protect workers’ rights, and provide critically needed social services.

Oxfam America recognizes the fundamental human right to dignified work and the critical role of the public sector in helping achieve that right. To that end, a federal jobs guarantee can help fulfill workers’ rights, strengthen the economy, and reduce racial and gender inequalities.

Baby Bonds: Reducing Economic, Racial, and Gender Inequality

By providing vital resources to all children when they reach adulthood, baby bonds can reduce inequality, promote economic security, and help close race and gender wealth gaps.

Oxfam America recognizes the human right to an adequate standard of living and calls on policymakers to support proposals for baby bonds, which can ensure that all young adults have the resources they need to be economically secure. Alongside measures that tax the rich, redistribute economic power, and invest in public services, baby bonds can alleviate the effects of policies that exacerbate inequality and deny marginalized communities the opportunity to build wealth.

Carbon Inequality Kills

Why curbing the excessive emissions of an elite few can create a sustainable planet for all

Climate Finance Unchecked: How much does the World Bank know about the climate actions it claims?

Oxfam finds that for World Bank projects, many things can change during implementation. On average, actual expenditures on the Bank’s projects differ from budgeted amounts by 26–43% above or below the claimed climate finance. Across the entire climate finance portfolio, between 2017 and 2023, this difference amounts to US$24.28–US$41.32 billion. No information is available about what new climate actions were supported and which planned actions were cut.

Now that the Bank has touted its focus on understanding and reporting on the impacts of its climate finance, it is critical to stress that without a full understanding of how much of what the Bank claims as climate finance at the project approval stage becomes actual expenditure, it is impossible to track and measure the impacts of the Bank's climate co-benefits in practice.

The Bank should improve its reporting practices, undertake a climate finance assessment on closed projects, standardize how it reports on climate finance in projects and create a public climate finance database.

A webinar was hosted on October 17, 2024 to launch this report and you can access the recording here.

This page was updated on November 1, 2024 to address an error in the accompanying data. This change has no impact on the findings of the report.

Food Wars: Conflict, Hunger, and Globalization, 2023

Most wars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been “food wars”: food and hunger were used as weapons, food and food-related water and energy infrastructure were damaged intentionally or incidentally, and food insecurity persisted as a legacy of conflict destructiveness. Frequently, food insecurity, in turn, is a trigger or underlying cause of conflict. This paper analyzes 54 active conflict, refugee-hosting, and conflict legacy countries with populations in 2023 facing “crisis-level” acute food insecurity, i.e., at Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) 3 or higher. In total, nearly 278 million people in these countries faced crisis-level hunger in 2023, accounting for 99% of the global population at IPC 3+ (281.6 million people).

Analysis indicates that war-displacement-hunger crises occur in countries that continue to rely heavily on primary product exports. Paradoxically, peacebuilding efforts have often assumed that economic liberalization offers the best or only pathway to sustainable peace. Yet struggle for control over fungible primary commodities can fund more violence, increased inequality, continued instability, and the risk of renewed conflict.

Agricultural export commodities are important sources of revenue for smallholder farmers and governments in conflict-affected, food-insecure countries. The conflict implications of export- and food-crop value chains are therefore crucial for future food-wars policy discussions and actions. Some efforts seek to link export crops to efforts to achieve peace, sustainable livelihoods, and environmental restoration. Other proposed solutions focus on adopting more holistic national development strategies, including food-systems approaches that protect and promote the right to food and livelihood security, as well as policy approaches and frameworks that might more effectively consider conflict, globalization, and climate change in food and nutrition policy.