Which awful Devspeak words would you most like to ban? Your chance to vote on the Terrible Ten

September 28, 2018
Ann Huddock of Counterpart got in touch recently to discuss the idea of a post on how much she hates the word ‘empowerment’ (she’s banned it in Counterpart comms). In the end, we decided that the word had already got enough criticism, but I put out a tweet asking people to nominate other devspeak words we should ban, and my
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Should Positive Deviance be my next Big Thing?

September 27, 2018
I’ve been mulling this over for a while now, and thought I’d consult the FP2P hivemind, following a few initial conversations, including one earlier this week with Oxfam’s Irene Guijt and some PD fans at the Said Business School (here’s their rather good report of a PD conference back in 2010, from which I nicked the box comparing PD with
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Links I Liked

September 26, 2018
Why commas really do matter An extraordinary piece of investigative journalism by BBC Africa uses all the digital arts to track down the culprits of an atrocity captured on an anonymous video – 2 women & 2 young children are led away by a group of soldiers. They are blindfolded, forced to the ground, and shot 22 times ‘More than
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Self Reliance, Hip Hop, Resistance and Weapons of the Weak: do we need to rethink Empowerment?

September 25, 2018
A 3 day conference at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) inevitably makes you dig deep and question your assumptions, and last week’s gathering of the Action for Empowerment and Accountability research programme was no exception. This time, presentations from Myanmar and Mozambique set me off. In Myanmar the researchers had expected to find communities opting between ethnic and state
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Are Big Companies Walking Their Talk on the SDGs? New report digs into the evidence

September 24, 2018
Following my recent semi-conversion to SDG agnosticism, Namit Agrawal, Uwe Gneiting and Ruth Mhlanga introduce a new Oxfam report on business and the SDGs Business has become a fixture in discussions around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  This week in New York we will see the familiar picture of executives of the world’s largest corporations convening around the UN’s General
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Peace has a PR Problem: How would you fix it?

September 21, 2018
Today is the UN International Day of Peace. You probably won’t have heard of it. Harriet Lamb, CEO of International Alert, explains why that matters. Our dictionaries mirror what’s happening in society. And the words we use shape how we see events and how we act. So it’s a sad reflection that dictionaries are full of the words of war: from
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Thumbs up or thumbs down? Did the Millennium Villages Project work?

September 20, 2018
Guest post by Chris Barnett, Director of Technical Excellence, Itad Back in the mid-2000s, one project stood out as a bold attempt to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at a local level: The Millennium Villages Project (MVP). Spearheaded by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the project sought to demonstrate how the MDGs could be achieved through an integrated approach to rural
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Are fuel riots the food riots of the 21st century?

September 19, 2018
Ploughing through the papers for this week’s big IDS conference of the ‘Action for Accountability and Empowerment’ research consortium (of which Oxfam is a member), a new IDS paper on energy protests jumped out at me. Here’s the brilliant Naomi Hossain summarizing it in an IDS blog: ‘Modern life depends on fuel, even while tackling climate change means cutting subsidies for
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Here’s what we know about closing civic space – what other research would you suggest?

September 18, 2018
I head off to the Institute of Development Studies today to take stock on our joint ‘Action for Empowerment and Accountability’ research programme. One of the main discussions will be on a research agenda on ‘closing civic space’, so this blog sets out what we know of the research to date, and asks you for further suggestions. The best place
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Links I Liked

September 17, 2018
Ace number cruncher Max Roser has redrawn the map of the world so that country size is proportional to its population. So large countries with a small population shrink in size – talking about you Canada, Mongolia, Australia, and Russia, and vice versa for heavily populated places like the Netherlands or Japan. Cool eh? And kind of obvious – has
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Some FP2P posts you might have missed – summer catch-up part 2

September 14, 2018
Another (final) round up of the posts you missed over the summer, if you were relying on your daily FP2P email to jog you into clicking through, or were just lounging in the sun. Here’s the main posts that went up from July until we fixed the email notifications a week or so ago Posts on new approaches to aid,
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Someone just called their new book How Change Happens – here’s my totally impartial review

September 13, 2018
Finding out that someone’s called their new book ‘How Change Happens’, and that it’s about social movements, is disturbing – a bit like finding out that someone who looks just like you has assumed your identity and is chatting to your mates. But the new book by Leslie R Crutchfield ‘How Change Happens: Why some social movements succeed while others
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