First Draft of ‘How Change Happens’ now ready – anyone want to read it?

October 30, 2015
Now for the scary part. Can I ask for a big favour? The first draft of my next book, How Change Happens, is ready, and I’m keen to get comments from as wide a range of people as possible. Deadline 10th December. Anyone out there prepared to chip in? If so, you can download the whole manuscript here  – it’s
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A nice example of how government-to-government peer pressure can lead to innovation

October 29, 2015
Guest post from John Hammock of the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative In your thought-provoking blog ‘Hello SDGs, what’s your theory of change?’ you rightly identify peer pressure as a potentially very effective means of governments coming to internalise the SDGs in their domestic processes and influencing others to follow suit. Let me give an instructive case study based
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Of Sasquatches and Flexible Programming: A genuine sighting

October 28, 2015
Lisa Denney, Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute, goes in search of an elusive development beast. Much has been written recently on the need for more flexible and adaptive development programming. This area has spawned considerable research attention across sectors, multiple workshops and communities of practice – but such ways of working in practice remain a little like the
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The Joy of Blogs (and Tweets): Why Academics should take Social Media seriously

October 27, 2015
This is an edited version of a piece I wrote for the LSE International Development Blog Before I started teaching at LSE in January, I had the impression that the academics and researchers around the school were totally social media savvy – prolific tweeters like Charlie Beckett and top blogs like LSE Impact are high up on my follow list.
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Links I Liked

October 26, 2015
Top geek cartoonist XKCD supports World Polio Day, while managing to satirise innovation fetishists On the other hand, for all the tech sceptics out there, here’s the price of light over the last 700 years, from Max Roser Where to go for reliable gender stats, including that 2/3 of the world’s illiterate adults are women: the UN’s new The World’s
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The Politics of Data – the bit the geeks forget?

October 23, 2015
Had a really thought-provoking conversation with Dustin Homer of Development Gateway last week. Development Gateway was originally set up inside the World Bank, then spun off as an independent tech organisation, and focuses on helping governments and international organizations make better use of data in their decision-making. So far, so technocratic, but Dustin got in touch because he read my
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Can we afford the super rich?

October 22, 2015
Max Lawson, Oxfam’s Head of Global Campaigns and Public Policy, unpacks the political implications of the recent Credit Suisse report on global wealth. At the beginning of this year the Economist, a right leaning newspaper, criticised Oxfam for predicting that by 2016 the world’s wealthiest 1% would hold more net wealth than the other 99% put together, calling our projection
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How will the SDGs differ from the MDGs?

October 21, 2015
This piece, written with my Oxfam colleague Takumo Yamada, went up on the International Growth Centre blog earlier this week Will the SDGs be bigger, better and more universal than their predecessor, or a bafflingly complex mishmash of issues that fail to generate traction on decision making? They could go either way. Now that the list is finalised, most of
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How to use ‘Systems Thinking’ in practice: good new guide

October 20, 2015
This was posted by John Chettleborough on Oxfam’s Policy and Practice blog today, and I really liked it, so here you are Ever wondered what connects Buddhism, climate change, improved governance and a flexible approach to decision making? If so….read on. Currently if you work in the international development sector it is difficult to escape from the term “systems thinking”.
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Do we need to think in new ways about gender and inequality?

October 20, 2015
Following on from last week’s post by Naila Kabeer, Jessica Woodroffe, Director of the Gender and Development Network, argues for a change in the way we think about gender and inequality The recent launch of Oxfam’s Gender and Development Journal issue on Inequalities got me thinking about the much heralded ‘leave no one behind’ agenda in the new Sustainable Development Goals
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Links I Liked

October 19, 2015
Schrödinger’s Immigrant, via Ingrid Srinath Could the Jaded Aid satirical cardgame help reform the aid industry? Or is it just the perfect Xmas pressie for jaundiced aid workers? humanosphere.org/basics/2015/10 Poverty is falling faster among Africa’s rising number of female headed households (which are now up to 26% of the total), but we don’t really know why Good news on Malaria
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Why ‘Raising Your Voice’ is crucial in development, and getting harder in many countries

October 16, 2015
Today is Blog Action Day (as if you didn’t know) and this year’s theme is ‘raising your voice’. That resonates with me for both positive and negative reasons. On the negative side, in dozens of developing countries it’s getting a lot more dangerous to raise your voice, if what you say is not congenial to the government. States are busily
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