Are Missionaries naturally suited to ‘Doing Development Differently’ and Advocacy?

June 29, 2018
Missionaries get a bad press in development circles, often caricatured as the cultural and spiritual shock troops of colonialism and imperialism. I’m sure there has sometimes been truth in that, but talking to a roomful of them in Dublin earlier this week, at the annual meeting of Misean Cara (a membership network for missionary organizations) I got a much more
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Seven Rules of Thumb for Adaptive Management – what do you think?

June 28, 2018
Adaptive Management (aka Doing Development Differently, Thinking and Working Politically) seems to be flavour of the month, at least in my weird bubble of a world, so the next week is going to feature a series of posts on different aspects of what looks like a pretty important ‘movement’ First up, at one of the sessions at the Bologna workshop
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Book Review: How to be a Craftivist: the art of Gentle Protest, by Sarah Corbett

June 27, 2018
I spent an idyllic bank holiday recently in a hammock reading How to be a Craftivist: the art of gentle protest. Seemed fitting somehow, as the book is all about ‘slow activism’. Corbett, an award-winning campaigner and lifelong activist whose leftie parents dragged her along on demos from the age of 3, starts with a question: ‘If we want our
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Scott Guggenheim defends Community Driven Development

June 26, 2018
Scott Guggenheim, one of the better known names in Community Driven Development (CDD), comes out with a take-no-prisoners critique of the critique of CDD by 3ie (apologies for acronym overload), featured in my recent post. It’s long, but I just couldn’t find places to cut it. Duncan obviously thrives on controversy, so he’s asked me to adapt my comment on
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Links I Liked

June 25, 2018
Now this is what I call a political ad. Why am I running for Congress against a Tea Party Republican in Texas? It all started with a door. MJ Hegar sets out her stall: The human price of stocking supermarket shelves. Tim Gore introduces a big new Oxfam campaign ‘That tearing sound you can hear is the veil that normally
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The lure of the complicated: systems thinking, data and the need to stay complex

June 22, 2018
Sometimes messy, frustrating conversations are the most productive – as you wrestle with confusion, small lightbulbs flash on in your head – either insights or the onset of a migraine. Earlier this week I spent an afternoon at the Gates Foundation in London, discussing what systems diagnostics can offer to groups like the World Bank, DFID and RISE, a big
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Democracy’s Retreat: a ‘how to’ guide

June 21, 2018
A beautifully written, if depressing, 3 page essay in this week’s Economist explores the mechanics of the democratic reversal in dozens of countries. Shades of Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas’ great book, How to Rig an Election. Some excerpts: ‘A democracy typically declines like this. First, a crisis occurs and voters back a charismatic leader who promises to save them.
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What did I learn from a week discussing Adaptive Management and MEL?

June 20, 2018
Just got back from an extraordinarily intense week in Bologna, running (with Claire Hutchings and Irene Guijt) a course on ‘Adaptive Management: Working Effectively in the Complexity of International Development’. The 30 participants mainly came from NGOs and non-profits, but with a smattering of government officials and consultants. What made the discussion different from previous AM chats is that they
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The Global Humanitarian Assistance 2018 report is out today – here are six top findings

June 19, 2018
The Global Humanitarian Assistance 2018 report is out today. Here are some of the headline findings and supporting numbers: 1. Humanitarian Assistance (HA) mainly goes to a small number of countries: ‘60% of all assistance was channelled to 10 countries only, with 14% going to Syria, the largest recipient, and 8% to Yemen, the second-largest.’ 2. HA is growing in
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9 development trends and their implications for tomorrow’s aid jobs

June 18, 2018
This is an expansion of a blog first posted in February. According to the reader survey, most people reading this blog are a lot younger than me – students or entrants to the job market, with at least half an eye on how they are going to earn a living in the decades to come. I read and write a
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Links I Liked

June 15, 2018
Graphics are back up, on an interim blog format til we sort it out properly. Please let me know if you are experiencing any probs with the new format. The Free Tommy Robinson March has accidentally bumped into the World Naked Bike Ride event in London. What a time to be alive. ht ‘Chairman LMAO’ ‘Petronia is a simulated learning
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What did I learn from teaching LSE students about advocacy and campaigns?

June 14, 2018
I spent a week last month marking student assignments. Sounds boring, right? Well it was brain-drainingly hard work, but it was also enthralling. Usually I just give lectures or write stuff, and the level of feedback is pretty cursory. In contrast, marking the assignments for a course you have taught provides a unique peek inside students’ heads – you find
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