Meetings with Remarkable Women: Shen Ye, Organic Activist and Chinese Rock Chick

June 14, 2016
Last post from my recent visit to Beijing If promoting organic farming through Oxfam partner Beijing Farmers Markets sounds a bit worthy, Shen Ye is anything but – she’s one of the funniest people I’ve met in years and during a morning spent visiting farms on the outskirts of the City, was both fascinating and reduced me to repeated fits of
Read more >>

Links I Liked

June 13, 2016
I missed a week due to being in twitter-free Beijing, but now back in the warm and suffocating embrace of social media – here’s last week’s highlights The goose that laid golden eggs. There’s fools, there’s wise men, and then there’s economists. Via Robert Went  Apparently, there’s an election coming up in the US….. ‘I have the best theories, I really
Read more >>

How Buddhist Tax Accountants and Whistle Blowers can change the world

June 10, 2016
Max Lawson is back again (he seems to have more time to write now he’s Oxfam International’s policy guy on inequality) to discuss tax morality and a bizarre encounter with a Buddhist accountant A few years ago I went on a hiking holiday with a number of people I didn’t know, and ended up befriending a tax accountant.  He was a very
Read more >>

Where have we got to on adaptive learning, thinking and working politically, doing development differently etc? Getting beyond the People’s Front of Judea

June 9, 2016
Props to Dave Algoso (left) and Alan Hudson at Global Integrity for making the effort to compare and contrast 9 different initiatives that are all heading in roughly the right direction in reforming aid Aid, development, and governance practitioners increasingly recognize that change happens through iterative processes (trying, learning, adapting the approach taken, and trying again) as opposed to the linear
Read more >>

How does Change Happen in China?

June 8, 2016
The honest answer is of course that I have no idea. Given China’s size, complexity, opacity and the language barrier created by being a non-mandarin speaker, a week of meetings and conversations can only leave a string of vague and often contradictory impressions. But here they are anyway: Is China’s development complex or complicated? The standard account of China’s extraordinary
Read more >>

What’s happening to inequality in China? Update from a visit to Beijing

June 7, 2016
Spent a fascinating few days in Beijing last week, at the invitation of Oxfam Hong Kong. The main topic was inequality, including a big seminar with lots of academics (NGOs are very research-based in China – it was a graphtastic, PhD-rich week). Here are some of the headlines: Income Inequality in China is changing fast. According to the National Bureau
Read more >>

First inequality, now neoliberalism: how many statues are left to kick over outside the IMF?

June 6, 2016
Max Lawson, now Oxfam International’s policy guy on inequality, shares his newfound love for an old foe Last week the IMF published an article in its magazine that caused a considerable stir around the world.  Entitled ‘Neoliberalism: oversold?’ the short piece by Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, all from the Fund’s Research Department, questions whether the economic approach
Read more >>

The 2016 Multidimensional Poverty Index was launched yesterday. What does it say?

June 3, 2016
This is at the geeky, number-crunching end of my spectrum, but I think it’s worth a look (and anyway, they asked nicely). The 2016 Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index was published yesterday. It now covers 102 countries in total, including 75 per cent of the world’s population, or 5.2 billion people. Of this proportion, 30 per cent of people (1.6 billion) are
Read more >>

Community Philanthropy: it’s a thing, and you need to know about it

June 2, 2016
  Guest post from Jenny Hodgson of the Global Fund for Community Foundations It’s almost always the same argument. Or excuse. Governments joining the accelerating global trend of restricting civil society at home like to claim that they are protecting their country against meddling “foreign powers”. No one has to like, or agree, with that point of view in order
Read more >>

Conference rage and why we need a war on panels

June 1, 2016
Today’s post definitely merits a vlog – apologies for quality (must get a decent camera) With the occasional exception (see yesterday’s post on Piketty), my mood in conferences usually swings between boredom, despair and rage. The turgid/self-aggrandizing keynotes and coma-inducing panels, followed by people (usually men) asking ‘questions’ that are really comments, usually not on topic. The chairs who abdicate responsibility
Read more >>