Innovation has become a defining marker of national progress and competitiveness. From digital technologies and healthcare to renewable energy and education, societies are increasingly shaped by their capacity to generate and apply new ideas. Yet, the global innovation landscape remains highly concentrated.
The United States and China dominate research and development investment, patent activity and advanced technology development, while Europe, Japan and South Korea form complementary hubs.
This geographic clustering raises familiar but urgent questions: What role can developing countries play in a world where innovation is structurally uneven? Can universities in the Global South become more than consumers of external models? And are there emerging conditions that may allow new voices, perspectives and priorities to shape global innovation narratives?
Universities in the innovation pipeline
In leading economies, innovation is rarely a standalone activity. It emerges from dense ecosystems in which universities play a central role – producing talent, generating research, and partnering with industry, government and venture capital. Universities like Stanford, MIT, Oxford or Tsinghua operate as nodes within systems that are well-funded, commercially agile and globally connected.
By contrast, universities in many parts of the developing world often contend with limited resources, inadequate infrastructure and competing mandates. Their place in national innovation systems is less assured, and expectations often exceed what is realistically supported. Nevertheless, this does not mean innovation is absent, only that it may take different forms, respond to different priorities and draw from different knowledge traditions.
Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, universities are increasingly seeking to redefine their role. In some cases, they are aligning more closely with local development challenges, such as climate resilience, health equity or food security, where innovation is not necessarily about high-tech disruption but about appropriate, sustainable and community-driven solutions.
Curriculum reform as a catalyst
Reimagining innovation also involves rethinking what and how universities teach. In many developing countries, curricula still reflect colonial legacies or imported templates that may not fully prepare students to solve local problems or participate meaningfully in the innovation economy.
Curriculum reform, when pursued strategically, can be a catalyst. Not only by integrating frontier areas like AI, green technologies or digital health but also by promoting interdisciplinary thinking, project-based learning and closer engagement with real-world contexts.
The goal is not to replicate Silicon Valley models but to nurture a new generation of problem-solvers who are grounded in their contexts while being globally aware.
Transnational education: Risk or opportunity?
One route through which universities in the Global South are seeking to broaden their horizons is transnational education (TNE). Often criticised for reinforcing asymmetrical dependencies where content flows from ‘provider’ to ‘recipient’, TNE can also evolve into a more collaborative and capacity-building mechanism.
Where partnerships are equitable and strategically aligned, TNE can enable co-developed programmes, shared research agendas and mobility pathways that enrich both sides. It can support the transfer of pedagogical models that promote innovation and help build academic ecosystems that are regionally relevant but internationally credible.
In Mauritius, Rwanda, Malaysia and the UAE, for example, efforts are underway to use TNE not merely to import global brands but to create regional education hubs that contribute to national innovation systems. Such models are still evolving, but they point to a shift: from dependency to interdependence and from consumption to co-creation.
A changing mobility landscape
Recent changes in global student mobility further complicate and perhaps enhance these dynamics. The tightening of visa rules and post-study work opportunities in traditional education destinations like the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia is prompting students, especially from Africa and South Asia, to explore alternative destinations.
This shift presents both a challenge and an opening. While it may disrupt long-established pipelines to Western institutions, it also creates space for new education hubs to emerge. Universities in the Global South that can offer quality, relevance and international connectivity may find themselves well-positioned to attract not only local students but also international ones.
This realignment may, in turn, accelerate investment in higher education infrastructure, the development of innovation-focused curricula and the strengthening of domestic research capacity. Some governments and university networks are already responding, not just to retain talent but to reposition themselves in a more multipolar higher education landscape.
Innovation on different terms
These developments raise deeper questions. What kinds of innovation are most urgently needed in the Global South? How do we value socially embedded forms of knowledge and problem-solving? Can South-South collaboration challenge the dominant paradigms of innovation defined largely by the North?
Universities are uniquely placed to mediate these tensions. But doing so may require more than isolated reforms. It calls for a shift in mindset, from emulation to experimentation, from benchmarking against external models to building on internal strengths.
There is, of course, no single path. Some institutions will pursue global rankings and research excellence strategies; others may prioritise community partnerships and applied problem-solving. What matters is that the space for innovation remains open to different logics, different origins and different futures.
A moment of possibility
Innovation is not owned by any one geography. While power and resources remain unevenly distributed, the conditions under which innovation can emerge are changing. Transnational education, shifting mobility patterns, curriculum reform and evolving institutional identities are converging in ways that invite new thinking.
For universities in the Global South, this moment offers both complexity and possibility. The challenge is not only to respond to global trends but also to help reshape them from within. What remains to be seen is how these institutions will seize the opportunity, not to replicate existing models of innovation but to imagine and nurture new ones, rooted in their own realities, yet connected to the world.
Dhanjay Jhurry is the managing director of the Uniciti International Education Hub in Mauritius. A former vice-chancellor of the University of Mauritius, he has been active in shaping regional higher education ecosystems through international partnerships, research-led innovation and transnational education initiatives.
The concept of “sustainable development” is a recent emergence in development literature and economics. Until recently, its usage was limited to environmental studies. It seems to me that its initial prominence came as a response to what was perceived as the overreach of the industrial sector, which led – among other outcomes – to the shrinkage of the agricultural sector (particularly traditional agriculture, forestry, and fisheries) and harmed the environment and the way of life in traditional communities.
Therefore, most early advocates of sustainable development focused their initial definitions on the conservation of natural resources and the ecosystem.
Over the past thirty years, “global climate” has joined the list of goals receiving attention from sustainable development advocates. Perhaps the most common definition at present is the one chosen by the World Commission on Environment and Development in its foundational report, Our Common Future.
Its essence is that sustainable development is that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the natural resources needed by future generations. This definition involves two fundamental concepts: the concept of needs, especially the “essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given,” and the concept of limitations imposed by the critical relationship between the intensive use of technology and trade requirements on the one hand, and the resources actually available in the natural environment on the other.
The previous definitions are not without weaknesses, particularly regarding technology restrictions and the role of humans in achieving sustainability. Therefore, I will propose a definition that avoids these weaknesses, describing a sustainable system as one capable of reproducing its basic foundations and continuing indefinitely. Thus, a sustainable system must be characterized by balance, combining:
1. Caring for environmental needs (i.e., natural resources, by restricting destructive actions).
2. The market (i.e., generating adequate surplus value to improve living standards) to avoid turning natural resource conservation into a cause of population impoverishment.
3. The community (i.e., being aligned with societal values regarding well-being and a virtuous life).
4. Expanding resources (i.e., relying on scientific research to develop new resources and increase the productivity of current resources. This makes technology a vital element in the sustainability system, but not in setting its criteria and ultimate purposes).
Accordingly, sustainable development is a project aimed at establishing a sustainable economic-living system through two mutually supporting objectives:
• First: Treating the factors that hinder or slow down economic and social development.
• Second: Establishing a socio-economic system capable of renewing its components and the elements necessary for its survival. This is specifically what we call “progress.”
Comprehensive development certainly aims to create the social engine of progress across its various fields.
I believe the factor that most severely hinders social and economic development is the “illusion” of inability to progress. I say “illusion” because we look at situations, actions, and knowledge as comparative matters. We first ask: Is this action possible or impossible? Then we look: Has anyone in the world done it or not? Based on that, we decide whether it is possible or impossible.
When we talk about progress, we recall the familiar models of the ancient and modern worlds. So we say that our society is capable of doing anything that others have been capable of, including the most advanced and delicate industries and the deepest and broadest sciences. This belief is a necessary prelude to the next question: If a human being like us, in America for example, was able to invent the airplane, what was made available to them that was not available to us so that we might do as they did?
In other words, the development question must begin with three premises:
1. First: We are capable of making progress because others were able to do so.
2. Second: There are obstacles that hindered us or slowed our momentum, and our duty is summarized in diagnosing and then removing them.
3. Third: This question is not related to identity or faith, so we do not seek a metaphysical answer for it; rather, it relates to human beings, the environment, and culture (social values), and we must search for its solution within these fields.
Many cities around the world are sinking because too much water is extracted from the groundwater reservoirs beneath them.
This sinking makes these coastal cities more exposed to rising seas as the climate warms.
But as our new research shows, this process can work in reverse; when groundwater is replenished, cities can rise.
Our findings also reveal an unexpected clue: faultlines play a key role in shaping where the fastest groundwater recovery and land uplift occur.
The global problem of sinking cities
Land subsidence, the gradual sinking of the ground surface, affects many of the world’s major cities.
Parts of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, are sinking more than ten centimetres each year, prompting the government to plan a relocation of the city.
The coastal city of Tianjin, China, is home to 15 million people. It, too, is a subsidence hotspot. If sinking there continues unabated, 15% of the city’s population will be underwater by 2120.
Similar stories are playing out from San Diego to Iran’s major cities, wherever groundwater has been pumped faster than it can refill.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, recent studies show around 80% of the urban coastline is sinking, and that groundwater may be a contributing factor in some areas, including Christchurch and Wellington.
How urban groundwater leads to sinking
Many cities are built above natural groundwater reservoirs (aquifers), and are literally held up, in part, by the water beneath them.
Think of a gigantic water balloon beneath a city. The balloon represents an aquifer full of water. When groundwater is pumped out, the “balloon” deflates, and the ground above sinks.
This matters most at the coast. If the land is sinking while the sea is rising, the two effects combine, meaning coastal cities experience relatively higher sea levels, and the impacts of climate change arrive sooner.
This effect of groundwater pumping on land subsidence is well understood, and improved groundwater management is often put forward as the key strategy for slowing or halting the sinking.
What is not clear is how the ground beneath a city responds when long-term water aquifer recovery happens. Does the ground simply rise back up, uniformly, like a balloon reinflating? Or is the response more complicated?
To answer this, we need two key things: long-term records of where the water is accumulating in the underground aquifers, and precise millimetre-scale measurements of elevation of the ground surface above.
Osaka, a natural laboratory
Osaka provided the perfect setting to explore this. Between the 1920s and 1960s, heavy groundwater pumping lowered water levels beneath the city by up to 30 metres, and the land sank by more than two metres in places.
This led the Japanese government to introduce strict groundwater regulations in the early 1960s. In the decades since, groundwater levels have been recovering steadily.
To track the groundwater levels, we looked at data from 44 monitoring wells, some reaching as deep as 500 metres below the surface, and stretching back in time to 1985.
To measure the tiny changes in ground elevation, we used a technique known as interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). This involves the repeat acquisition of satellite radar images of the Earth’s surface, tied to very accurate global navigation satellite system measurements of ground stations.
The results are striking. Across greater Osaka, home to about 15 million people, the ground is rising, and fast.
The speed of uplift averaged about four millimetres a year, and was as high as 12 millimetres a year in some places. Groundwater levels have also been steadily rising, at rates of up to a metre a year. Where water levels climbed fastest, so did the land.
But the map of uplift was also very patchy.
One city block could be uplifting fast, while less than 100 metres down the road it could be much slower. These abrupt changes aren’t random. They form narrow but continuous corridors that ran across the city.
We soon realised something unexpected: these corridors mapped almost perfectly onto known tectonic fault lines.
Faults act like dams
Faults are fractures in the Earth’s crust, and are usually thought of in terms of earthquakes. But we found they play another role here.
Picture a fault as a curtain hanging vertically underground, cutting through the aquifer. Instead of holding back light, it holds back water, blocking its sideways flow and acting like an underground dam.
On one side of Osaka’s Uemachi Fault, groundwater levels have been rising three times faster than on the other side.
We found the same pattern repeats at other faults across the city. Water dams on the “upstream” side of a fault, where it can’t easily flow through, driving faster groundwater recovery and faster uplift there, while the “downstream” side lags behind.
Our research highlights a potentially important opportunity for coastal cities adapting to sea-level rise.
Where groundwater depletion has contributed to land subsidence, reducing extraction and allowing aquifers to recover could reduce – and in some places potentially reverse – the downward movement of the land.
As seas continue to rise, keeping the ground beneath coastal cities from sinking could be an increasingly important part of adapting to a warming world.
“The Gulf should not merely adapt to the desert. It should learn from it.” says Marcus
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The defining environmental challenges of the Gulf are not abstract. They are measured every day in degrees Celsius and liters of water.
As the UAE continues investing in climate resilience, sustainable development and advanced technologies, architects face an increasingly urgent question: are we fully leveraging the materials and environmental knowledge unique to this region?
For decades, Gulf architecture has drawn on a mix of local and imported materials, technologies and construction systems, producing extraordinary results. The UAE is now a global reference point for architectural innovation and rapid urban growth. Yet one of the region’s most abundant resources remains largely untapped as a driver of that innovation: sand.
At American University of Sharjah (AUS), our research has been investigating this. Using computational modelling, we have studied how dune sand naturally accumulates, erodes and self-organises under wind and gravity, and how those same patterns can be translated, through digital fabrication and 3D printing, into new architectural systems. Other AUS projects have explored locally sourced materials and “material ecologies” designed to cut waste and strengthen the relationship between buildings and the environments that surround them.
This is not an argument for trading concrete towers for mud-brick ones, nor for romanticising the architecture of the past. Traditional Gulf building, with its thick walls, shaded courtyards, thermal mass and carefully oriented openings, emerged from a deep understanding of climate and material constraints long before mechanical cooling existed. That knowledge still matters. But simply reviving historical earthen techniques is not a realistic answer for a region where sand is abundant but suitable clay is comparatively scarce. The opportunity instead lies in asking a different question: what new forms of architecture can emerge when we start with the materials that are actually abundant here?
Discussions about the future of cities tend to focus on artificial intelligence, smart infrastructure and digital systems. These matter. But resilience is also a material question. A genuinely intelligent city has to consider not only how buildings operate, but what they are made from and how those materials relate to local conditions. Dune formations, erosion patterns and sedimentary processes are not random; they are physical records of an ongoing negotiation between wind, gravity, climate and time. Reading and applying that intelligence, rather than treating sand as merely a problem to stabilise, is the real design challenge.
This thinking is gaining ground. The recent TURAB Prize, a regional award recognising innovation in earth-based construction, highlighted projects examining sustainability and material stewardship. Two first-place entries came from AUS, both reinterpreting regional material knowledge through digital fabrication rather than looking backward. This reflects a broader shift in the profession: the most promising solutions are emerging not from choosing between tradition and technology, but from combining them.
Critics sometimes dismiss earth-based materials as nostalgic or impractical for contemporary cities. They are right that sand and earth alone will not build the future of Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Sharjah. But that misses the point. The question is not whether alternative materials can fully replace concrete and steel. They can’t, not yet and perhaps not ever at scale. It is whether building material systems that are better adapted to local conditions, and sourced locally, can reduce dependence on carbon-intensive construction. Even incremental shifts in sourcing, fabrication and deployment add up across a rapidly urbanising region.
Realizing that will take more than research papers and prize shortlists. It will take developers willing to pilot sand-based components at building scale, and regulators and funders willing to back that experimentation alongside the smart-infrastructure investment the UAE already prioritises. The technical groundwork, computational modelling, robotic fabrication and additive manufacturing, already exists. What is needed next is to treat material innovation with the same urgency as digital innovation.
The UAE is well placed to lead this. Few places combine such demanding environmental conditions with such ambitious investment in technological innovation, or such a rich legacy of climate-responsive design. Architecture’s role here extends beyond energy efficiency or certification. It is an opportunity to rethink the relationship between the built and the natural, so that buildings emerge from an understanding of the desert’s materials and processes rather than being imposed upon them.
The Gulf should not merely adapt to the desert. It should learn from it,not as heritage, but as foundation.
The future of Gulf architecture could be written in sand, not concrete.
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Marcus Farr, Fulbright Scholar and Associate Professor of Architecture at the American University of Sharjah, whose research focuses on desert materials, computational design and climate-responsive architecture.
New UN Sustainable Development Group analysis shows how rising fuel costs, debt burdens and limited fiscal space are compounding existing development pressures — and why countries need support that moves from crisis response to building resilience.
The economic spillovers from the crisis in the Middle East are reaching well beyond the region, compounding debt, food insecurity, climate shocks and limited fiscal space across developing countries, according to a new UN Sustainable Development Group policy brief released on Friday.
Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed and UNDP Administrator Alexander De Croo joined Member State representatives at a high-level event on Friday to discuss the impact of these poli-crises on sustainable development and what is needed to protect hard-won development gains.
The new policy brief, From Shock to Resilience: Protecting development gains amid compounding crises, co-authored by the UN Development Coordination Office (DCO) and UN Development Programme (UNDP), draws on analysis from across the UN development system and reporting from UN Country Teams. Its central message is that many countries are no longer managing one shock at a time. Instead, higher food, fuel and transport costs are colliding with debt burdens, climate shocks, food insecurity and constrained public finances.
Rising Prices, Shrinking Fiscal Space
The scale of the pressures is significant.
According to data by UNDP, across 130 countries, average retail prices for gasoline and diesel have risen by 22 and 32 per cent respectively since the conflict began in late February. At the same time, many developing countries have less room to absorb those shocks. Fifty-five developing countries — 44 per cent of the sample — now spend more than 10 per cent of government revenue on interest payments, compared with 32 countries a decade ago. Interest payments relative to revenue across developing economies are now at levels not seen in more than 20 years.
This is sharpening what the brief describes as a debt-development trade-off: governments face growing pressure to protect households from higher food and energy costs through subsidies, tax reductions and price controls, while also preserving fiscal stability and maintaining long-term development investment.
A May 2026 UNDP–DCO survey of 104 UN Country Teams highlighted the tension between short-term protection and medium-term fiscal sustainability; a subsequent September 2026 UNDP survey of 26 countries showed this trade-off intensifying with nearly 70 per cent of government policy interventions focusing on containing price increases through subsidies, price caps and rationing, while more than half of requests to the United Nations concerned support for increased access to, and mobilisation of, finance.
Caption: Across 130 countries, average retail prices for gasoline and diesel have risen by 22 and 32 per cent respectively since the conflict began in late February.
The effects are global, but they are not evenly distributed.
The brief finds that a country’s exposure depends on three interrelated factors: its dependence on imported food, fuel and fertiliser; the vulnerability of households and firms; and countries’ ability to respond through efficient use of fiscal resources, well-targeted social protection systems, strong institutions and access to finance.
Import-dependent developing economies with weak fiscal positions are among those facing the greatest pressure. Landlocked developing countries are particularly exposed to higher transport costs, while Small Island Developing States face acute dependence on imported fuel, food and maritime transport. Fragile and conflict-affected settings must absorb these new pressures on top of existing humanitarian, displacement and institutional challenges.
The current crisis is also interacting with wider global pressures, including climate-related shocks and trade disruptions affecting major trade corridors such as the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb, the Black Sea and the Panama Canal.
Caption: Import-dependent developing economies with weak fiscal positions are among those facing the greatest pressure.
The policy brief argues that countries increasingly need support that goes beyond emergency relief.
Governments are asking the UN development system for help with macroeconomic and fiscal analysis, price monitoring, vulnerability assessments, stronger social protection systems, resource mobilisation and access to finance.
UN Country Teams are already helping governments translate analysis of the impact into policy and financing options.
Thirty-five UN Country Teams have submitted proposals through the Joint SDG Fund’s Development Emergency Modality – Middle East crisis response window, focusing particularly on food security, fuel and energy, analytics and policy support. The aim is to help countries move from diagnosis to implementation and ultimately mobilise larger-scale public and private financing.
The brief calls for a decisive shift from absorbing shocks to building resilience — pairing better analysis and targeted social protection with stronger institutions, sustainable food and energy systems, and affordable finance. The goal is not simply to manage the next crisis, but to protect development gains before they are lost.
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