May 29, 2015
Went to a fascinating briefing on Oxfam’s work in the Syria crisis last week, which set out the underlying trends and the evolving challenges for aid agencies, beyond the periodic TV news bang bang coverage.. The numbers are stark: Total of 18 million people in need of humanitarian assistance inside and outside Syria – including almost 4m registered refugees and
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What kinds of women become leaders, and how can we support them?
May 28, 2015
Some of Oxfam’s most interesting work concerns women’s leadership – how to promote it, what impact it has etc. But what seems a convincing case study to me can be dismissed as an anecdote by a sceptic. For people wanting something more systematic, check out the ODI’s recent ‘Support to women and girls’ leadership: A rapid review of the evidence’,
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How does Gender change the way we think about Power?
May 27, 2015
I can’t attend the next get together of the Thinking and Working Politically network in Bangkok next month because of a prior commitment to speak at DFID’s East Kilbride office (ah, the glamour of the aid biz….). Apart from missing out on the Thai food, it’s also a shame because they are focusing on an area I’ve previously moaned about
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Links I Liked
May 26, 2015
Lots of people in Financing for Development mode in the run up to the Addis summit: Finance flows to Africa: From 1990-2012, total rose from $20bn to $120bn; Aid as % of total fell from 62% to 22% Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; Silk Road Fund; BRICS Bank: how China is transforming global development finance UK election post mortem (continued) Britain
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Got any technical problems, glitches etc with this blog? If so, speak now
May 25, 2015
Dear FP2P readers, I gather you’ve had a few problems with stuff like sending comments, but now I have a keen new webmeister ready and eager to sort out glitches and improve the blog. To help him out, could you please feed back via the comments page (if you can), or twitter/email (dgreen[at]oxfam.org.uk) on: a) stuff that doesn’t work, eg
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Is ‘give them land rights’ enough? Taking the temperature of the global land debate
May 22, 2015
A bunch of students and academics from Sheffield University had what sounds like a fun time at last week’s big global meeting on land. George Barrett, Yoshabel Durand, Tom Goodfellow, Vremudia Irikefe, Mikael Omstedt, Edward Searight, Julie Shi, Deborah Sporton and Nguyen Vo report back. Last week, dispersed among 700 participants at the International Land Coalition’s global forum in Senegal sat
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What do we know about the long-term legacy of aid programmes? Very little, so why not go and find out?
May 21, 2015
We talk a lot in the aid biz about wanting to achieve long-term impact, but most of the time, aid organizations work in a time bubble set by the duration of a project. We seldom go back a decade later and see what happened after we left. Why not? Everyone has their favourite story of the project that turned into
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Oh dear. Another unreadable European Report on Development. Good stats on finance (FFD) though.
May 20, 2015
Here I go again. Sorry. Europe is home to some of the world’s most interesting and innovative research and action on aid and development, littered with smart thinktanks, thoughtful academics, and reflective practitioners. So it would be great to create some kind of intellectual counterweight to the US-based dominance of the World Development Report and others. Why then is the
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What can we learn from a great example of high speed policy response to the Nepal Earthquake?
May 19, 2015
For a while, I’ve been arguing that policy wonks need to grab the windows of opportunity created by shocks, scandals and crises, producing reactions, research and proposals in the immediate aftermath of such a ‘critical juncture’. For example, we know there are going to be floods in Somerset or Pakistan at some point in the next few years, so in
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Links I Liked
May 18, 2015
The only possible response is ‘thankyou to all involved’ for this wonderful pic (coming soon to a powerpoint near you) [h/t Damian Hughes] To end extreme poverty, we must also address extreme affluence.’ Advice from some dangerous radicals (aka faith leaders) on how to end poverty Economics is reinventing itself as an empirical discipline, argues Barry Eichengreen. Whatever next? Some
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If Complexity was a person, she would be a Socialist. Jean Boulton on the politics of systems thinking.
May 15, 2015
Jean Boulton (physicist, management consultant and social scientist, right) responds to Owen Barder’s Wednesday post on thinking of development as a property of a complex adaptive system. I’d like to go a bit further than Owen on the implications of complexity for how we understand power and politics. It is generally the case that the powerful get more powerful and
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How do we get better at learning from history? Please help design a research programme.
May 14, 2015
Couple of tech glitches have delayed Jean Boulton’s response to yesterday’s post by Owen Barder, so here’s one I made earlier. Why aren’t we more systematic in learning from history, when it comes to developmental success? Over a decade ago, Ha-Joon Chang rocked the world of World Trade Organization delegates with ‘Kicking Away the Ladder’, which showed that the very
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