Institute of Development Studies

More than forty years ago, Madonna claimed in her massive, generation-defining hit that ‘we are living in a material world’. Today, as the global scramble for critical minerals intensifies – driven by their recognition as essential to national security, industrial strategy, and the energy transition – those lyrics carry an unexpected weight.

Last week, parts of the UK hit 36.4°C, breaking the previous record of 35.6°C in 1976. Red weather warnings were issued by the MET Office, who called it “unprecedented for June” and described it as “another marker on how climate change is shifting the dial on temperature extremes in the UK.” The week was filled with tube and train disruptions, school closures, health warnings, and news footage across the country showed people fanning themselves while sweating profusely. Heatwave in London.

Last week, the UK House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee met to hear evidence into the UK’s engagement with the multilateral system. The Committee invited IDS Senior Research Fellow Professor Jing Gu to give evidence on China’s role in shaping and creating multilateral institutions and the implications this has for global order and UK foreign policy.

If climate policy is to become more grounded, more inclusive and more effective, the challenge is not only to improve the supply of knowledge, but also to build institutions that can recognise and work with knowledge that is diverse and that exists in more than one language. The authors of the Caderno analysing the evidence- Credit: Miguel Loureiro What happens to evidence once it enters the policy process? Who decides what counts as credible, relevant or useful evidence in the first place?

Over the past two decades, lower-income countries, donors, and international organisations have devoted considerable effort to strengthening lower-income countries’ capacity to tax cross-border economic activity. Much of this effort has centred on adopting and implementing international tax standards developed in bodies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Yet critics have long argued that these standards are poorly suited to lower-income contexts.

Join us for an in-person and online event in which a panel of experts will discuss critical minerals and development. The global rush for critical minerals: lithium, cobalt, rare earths, copper, and more, is often framed as a story of great-power rivalry, supply chain security, and energy transition challenges.

Across conflict-affected settings, checkpoints are much more than barriers to movement. They are sites where authority is asserted, revenues are collected, and power is negotiated.

The gaze from space is very seductive. Satellite image analysis seems to dominate land use systems science these days and certainly the technologies available have far outstripped the careful analysis of air photos with optical steroscopes and chinagraph pencils. But the satellite gaze can be misleading. Trends can be asserted when in fact variation is central. Patches where important dynamics occur can be missed. This is why careful interpretation, as any GIS analyst will tell you, is key.

***CW// description of death*** On one of India’s hottest recorded mornings of April 2026, a tragic incident unfolded in a village in Latur district. As the temperature soared to around 41°C, a young mother placed her nine-month-old baby in the courtyard outside their one-room home to keep watch while attending to household chores. After an hour, she returned to find her infant unresponsive and no longer breathing. The baby had died silently, with the mother recalling, “He made no sound.

What should a new era of development cooperation look like? How can we move from vision to action? And how can we create more inclusive and equitable partnerships? In today’s world, these questions have become ever more pressing and have been the focus of many global conversations between actors from the global South and the global North.