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There are almost 8 billion people on the planet with every single one of them producing some type of waste. The cost of recycling and money made by selling recyclable products has created a strong foundation for informal waste picking to exist. Waste pickers sort through garbage to find recyclable material; it is estimated that there are around 20 million waste pickers worldwide. In 2022, I went to experience life as a waste picker in Brasilia, Brazil for a day to understand issues that may continue to exist in this informal industry. I worked in a triage center and used this experience to inform my autoethnography; even though I have worked in waste picker research for almost a decade, this experience led to a different conclusion. The most interesting issue that I found while working as a waste picker was the lack of uniformity in waste picking, which led to people working on the streets or in co-op triage centers. This population is vulnerable which is worsened from exposure to hazards by nature of the informal environment; this situation contributes to ongoing poor working conditions through lack of governmental oversight, policy development, and change. Ultimately, informality needs to be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do rising powers relate to international institutions? At the same time as rising regional powers from the South emerge as key players in international politics, they confront a highly institutionalised world order established and maintained by and for the United States and its allies. Traditional perspectives identify three major patterns of behaviour for rising states in international institutions: balancing, spoiling, and being coopted. This article uses these perspectives to ask how the redistributive aspirations of three rising regional powers – India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) – impact on international institutions in the fields of trade, money, and security. The findings indicate that there is strong variation across issue areas. Trade provides support for the spoiling perspective, while the areas of money and security exhibit aspects familiar both to the balancing and cooptation perspectives. A broader picture emerges of IBSA states' general integration into hegemonic norms and being coopted into existing international institutions, but at the same time as balancing the influence of the established powers and reforming these institutions to conform to a more South-oriented, sovereigntist image of world order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to survey the evolution of technology policy in Brazil from its inception to the mid 1990s, paying particular at- tention to the impact of rapid trade and market liberalisation. The analy- sis reveals that the onset of liberalisation has done relatively little to intensify attempts to become more technologically self-reliant or capable. Instead, long established modes of technological acquisition and de- velopment–based on imported basic designs and minor local adaptations– have stubbornly remained in place. The very persistence of this situation is suggestive of the scale of institutional and policy changes which would need to be wrought in order to induce greater technological dynamism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]