Links I Liked

April 30, 2018
Got back from Costa Rica (fab holiday, here’s a taste of one of the more exciting moments – yep that’s me) to find a Chaplinesque backlog of social media, emails, draft blog posts etc etc. That’ll teach me to go offline. ‘Economists tweet less, mention fewer people and have fewer conversations with strangers, and use less accessible language with more
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Why donors ignore the evidence on what works, and transparency and accountability projects are a dead end. David Booth’s Non-Farewell Lecture.

April 27, 2018
ODI is always innovating, and earlier this week organized a non-farewell lecture for one of its big thinkers, David Booth. As far as I could work out, this was a celebration of them stopping paying him (aka ‘retirement’), while he continues to work for them for free as a visiting fellow. Interesting business model. Anyway, for those that don’t know
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The World Bank’s flagship report this year is on the future of work – here’s what the draft says

April 26, 2018
The World Bank’s 2019 World Development Report will be on ‘The Changing Nature of Work’ and It’s worth reading because, even though this kind of annual flagship format feels a bit dated, WDRs are always a treasure trove of references and ideas, while what they miss out adds important insights into mainstream thinking in the aid biz. In late March
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Book Review: Can Intervention Work? Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus

April 25, 2018
We’ve had some great speakers at the LSE this year, but Rory Stewart was top of the pops, according to the students’ evaluations. He rocked up at LSE, despite having just been reshuffled to Minister for Prisons, spoke without notes, and blew everyone away. Alas, he insisted on it being off the record, so I cheated – I went back
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Smart thinking from USAID on putting adaptive management into practice

April 23, 2018
I recommend USAID’s recent paper ‘What difference does CLA (Collaborate; Learn; Adapt) make to development: Key findings from a recent literature review’, which provides further evidence that USAID for all its problems with the Administration, continues to do some really interesting work. The 12 key findings are neatly summarized in this graphic: The paper’s only 5 pages, but for those
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Links I Liked

April 9, 2018
It’s going to be a long day at Prague airport…. ht Misha Glenny Really amazing legal activism in Colombia, on intergenerational equity and environmental destruction. And the good guys won. ht Tessa Khan What to say when someone tries to mansplain away the gender pay gap Brilliant David Booth (ODI) piece on doing problem-driven development: four lessons from Nepal “Following
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Adaptive Management in Myanmar – draft paper on Pyoe Pin for your comments

April 7, 2018
Ok, FP2P hivemind, I want your comments on a draft paper about an iconic Adaptive Management programme, Pyoe Pin in Myanmar. My co-author is Angela Christie. The paper is for the Action for Empowerment and Accountability Research Programme. Here’s the exec sum, and you can download the whole 20-page paper here.  This paper examines adaptive techniques in aid programming in
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Africa’s First Panther Economy? Wakanda’s development dilemmas

April 6, 2018
Guest post by Dulce Pedroso (Manager, Health) and Taylor Brown (Director, Governance), Palladium Wakanda is in transition. This small, but prosperous East African nation has never been colonised. It has never received foreign aid, technical assistance, loans or outside advice. Yet Wakanda has thrived in its seclusion. It has managed its vast resource wealth wisely. Its isolationist foreign and autarkic
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Partnering Under the Influence: How to Fix the Global Fund’s Brewing Scandal with Heineken

April 5, 2018
This guest post is from Robert Marten (left, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and Ben Hawkins (LSHTM and University of York) The new head of the Global Fund to Fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Peter Sands recently argued that “the global health community needs to engage with the private sector more rather than less.” Yet even most advocates of public-private partnership
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An experiment in participatory blogging on Ebola in Sierra Leone

April 4, 2018
Anthropologists do things differently, including blogging. My attention was piqued by Tim Allen’s reply to a commenter on his recent post (with Melissa Parker) on Ebola in Sierra Leone, in which he casually mentioned ‘It is perhaps worth adding that the chief and elders wanted us to write it, and we read it out at a meeting of the whole
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Positive Deviance in action: the search for schools that defy the odds in Kenya

April 3, 2018
I’ve been thinking about why there is so little attention to Positive Deviance in development practice, so got very excited by this experiment in East Africa. Guest post from Sheila P Wamahiu (left), of Jaslika Consulting, and Kees de Graaf and Rosaline Muraya (right), of Twaweza  After two hours of trampolining down dirt roads, getting lost more than once (thanks, Google
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