Haiti Reconstruction: Two cheers (and one big boo) for Paul Collier’s plan

January 29, 2010
Oxford economics professor Paul Collier is the policy entrepreneur’s policy entrepreneur. The man who coined the phrase ‘bottom billion’ has an unparalleled ability to reach decision makers with cogent, timely and well written arguments. Paul has a long-standing connection with Haiti – he was previously Ban Ki-Moon’s special adviser on the country, (read his January 2009 paper for the UN
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How to turn knowledge into policy (without losing your job)

January 28, 2010
Together with Martin Walsh, our team’s research methods adviser, I’ve been browsing through some of the literature on how to ensure our work has impact…… After a year in which Britain’s top drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, was sacked by the Home Secretary (interior minister) for overstepping the line between providing advice and advocating specific changes to policy, you’d be
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Can you comment on Oxfam’s analysis of the global economic crisis?

January 27, 2010
Since early 2009, Oxfam has been researching the impact of the global economic crisis on poverty and poor communities, and the way governments and others have responded. With co-authors Richard King and May Miller Dawkins, I’ve now pulled together focus group discussions and in depth interviews with 2,500 people, 11 country case studies and regional overviews into a draft research
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Reconstruction in Haiti, what do we know from previous disasters?

January 26, 2010
The Haiti operation is moving rapidly from rescue to reconstruction . What major challenges can we expect to emerge? What sort of policies have delivered results after previous earthquakes? One of the best sources on this is Responding to Earthquakes 2008: Learning from earthquake relief and recovery operations, by the ALNAP network.  Here are some highlights of that report, plus
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Zero rupee notes; MLK and powerpoint; Millennium professors; new sites on globalization and politics of climate change and what Obama could learn from Bartlett: links I liked

January 25, 2010
Battling corruption with a zero rupee note [h/t Jo Rowlands] If Martin Luther King had had powerpoint….. Owen Barder:   What is it like being a Millennium Village? Shopkeeper:     Very good. We have lots of things. O:                           Does everything work well? Shopkeeper:     No, not all of it.  But we are much better off now. O:                          Who decides what to change? Do you have a
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This is why I work for Oxfam

January 22, 2010
Yolette Etienne, the Oxfam GB country director in Haiti, in an extraordinary interview with Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, matter of factly discusses burying her mother in her garden before rejoining the relief effort. For regular updates (audio, video, text), links etc from the relief effort, go to this website set up by some tech savvy Oxfam relief workers and
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Why is humanitarian work so hard in cities?

January 21, 2010
By chance, the day before the Haiti earthquake, we were having a discussion at Oxfam about why, when it comes to feeding programmes, disaster relief etc urban work tends to be both harder and less attractive to NGOs than doing equivalent things in rural settings. This reflected an increasing conviction that we need to do more on urban issues. Although
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Can we stay the course on education?

January 20, 2010
Education is an aid good news story, but one that needs renewed commitment if it is not to turn sour. This from ‘Rescuing Education for All’, published by Oxfam yesterday: ‘Remarkable progress was being forged across the developing world, spurred by a new global commitment to the Education For All (EFA) goals. These goals were answered by substantial increases in
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Degrowth – is it useful or feasible?

January 19, 2010
Thought I’d check out what this ‘degrowth’ idea is about so went to a public meeting organized by a couple of new economics thinktanks (CEECEC and nef). It was a combination of seriously old school (standing room only; two and a half hours of speeches) and new (the bar was open throughout the event; death by powerpoint). ‘Degrowth’ is the
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Why conditional cash transfers can prevent HIV

January 15, 2010
Conditional Cash Transfers, in which poor families receive regular payments from governments or aid donors on condition they keep their kids in school, or get them vaccinated, are all the rage at the moment. They are seen as effective ways to reduce poverty, cushion poor families against shocks and get kids into school, but it seems their benefits extend even
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Do loose networks like the G20 strengthen or weaken developing country voice?

January 14, 2010
Networks are (yet) another development buzzword, contrasting with markets and hierarchies. They are proliferating in the international arena, as well as in academic literature – how many ‘Gs’ can you name apart from the G20 and the G8? What’s the difference? According to ‘Networks of Influence? Developing countries in a Networked Global Order‘, edited by Leonardo Martinez-Diaz and Ngaire Woods,
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Want to help write this year’s Human Development Report?

January 13, 2010
2010 marks two decades years since the first Human Development Report was published by the UN Development Program in 1990. Besides subsequently spawning huge numbers of useful national and thematic reports, the global HDRs have become some of the most influential of annual development analyses, for many years providing an invaluable intellectual counterweight to some of the excesses and errors
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