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This study analyzes the intent and effectiveness of international development aid through a content/trend analysis of over 42,000 aid projects in the water supply and sanitation sector. The water sector is a vital and understudied component of international development that is rife with internal contradictions. On the one hand, access to water is rapidly increasing cross-nationally, but over 700 million still lack improved access to water. On the other hand, renewable freshwater resources per capita are rapidly decreasing, and annual freshwater withdrawals are steadily increasing. These concurrent issues lead to water stress and decreased freshwater sustainability, which in turn affects global political, ecological, and health issues. To address these issues, national governments and multinational aid agencies have been lending to the water supply and sanitation sector since 1950. This study assesses the trends in international aid over the past 65 years for their intent and effectiveness in solving global water and development issues. The results have implications for the development effectiveness of nations’ and organizations’ aid and calls for social scientists to investigate well-being and environmental impacts simultaneously in all sectors of development.

While various researchers and practitioners agree that it will be hard to restructure our current global and local systems to adapt to and mitigate climate change, there is unsurprisingly great disagreement in how and if this can be accomplished and on what level(s), or if this is even what needs to be accomplished. These conversations have continued with the introduction of the “Anthropocene.” The dominant interpretation of the concept poses several solutions, one being national government restructuring to support environmental efforts and encouraging behavioral change. To join conversations that critically evaluate the conceptualization and implications of the Anthropocene with the world-systems perspective, we consider how the effectiveness of national environmental governance in reducing CO2 emissions varies by a country’s position in the global hierarchy. Using two-way fixed effects regression, this article tests how one aspect of this environmental governance, environmentally related taxes as a percentage of total tax revenue impacts CO2 emissions for 75 countries from 2000 to 2011. Given inequities in the global division of labor, which reinforce the dominance of higher-income countries and the exploitation of lower-income countries, we expect the effectiveness of environmental governance to vary tremendously by global position. Our results support the idea that the impact of environmental governance on CO2 emissions varies across countries at different income levels in the world-system, and this is due to external constraints. Such external influence is unsurprisingly neglected in dominant interpretations of the Anthropocene. In line with previous critical research, we argue that these external constraints undermine climate change solutions because they fail to address mutually reinforcing global, political, economic, and environmental inequalities.