In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. Interventions will be required over a long time for adaptation and mitigation. They will need to adopt different approaches to programming, while the ongoing development initiatives will need to be sensitive to climate change.

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For poor and rural Nepalis, the formal judicial system is of little value and largely inaccessible. With a diverse ethnic and linguistic population, Nepal’s different regions and groups have had their own unique and indigenously evolved customs for resolving disputes.

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On Monday, Malaysia’s High Court acquitted opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim of sodomy charges after a highly publicized and controversial 2-year trial. As Malaysia looks to elections in 2013, which are widely expected to be called later this year, In Asia‘s editor, Alma Freeman, interviews Herizal Hazri and Nurshafenath Shaharuddin in The Asia Foundation’s Malaysia office for insight into how the verdict could affect elections, Prime Minister Najib Razak’s recent democratic reforms, what this says about the independence of Malaysia’s judiciary, and more.

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For much of the past two decades, many Southeast Asians have expressed frustration that U.S. policy treated their region with benign neglect or indifference, and that the United States’ attention was episodic rather than consistent. In 2011, the Obama administration announced that the U.S. needed to make “a strategic pivot” in its foreign policy…

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In 2011, Asia grappled with a host of devastating shocks, both natural and man-made. As challenging and economically harsh as they have been, they have provided an opportunity for Asia’s emerging economies to dramatically assert their economic resilience and regional influence.

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One of the virtues of a regular exercise at peering into a new year is that you can check your own predictions from the past year. My predictions that I made here for the Philippines in 2011 were correct in three of four instances: Peace talks did begin (those with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front had more progress than those with the National Democratic Front)…

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My colleagues in The Asia Foundation’s Environment Program recently returned from Bangkok, where the Asia-Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum they were scheduled to attend was canceled due to the worst flooding in Thailand in 60 years. The disaster resulted in over 600 deaths, approximately 10 million lives affected, $21 billion in lost revenues from major industries, and an estimated $24 billion dollars in damage to property…

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