Who wants to be a Volunteer? Book Review

October 31, 2018
An estimated 10 million people will head from North to South this year as volunteers, seeking a mix of adventure, altruism and self improvement. Volunteering is big (a $2bn industry), but is it beautiful? Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad, a 350 page tome aimed at informing and guiding would-be volunteers, left me with very mixed feelings on
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Payment by Results: what is the Evidence from the First Decade?

October 30, 2018
Paul Clist, who actually seems to enjoy reading project documents, introduces his new paper on Payment by Results, a popular new aid mechanism (see also his 2016 post on the same topic). In a new paper, I argue that despite its public support for the idea, DFID hasn’t really tried Payment by Results, at least not in the way its
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Links I Liked

October 29, 2018
Nice graph of advanced v emerging + developing economies, share of global GDP. Anyone fancy drawing a squid on this, to give Branko Milanovic’s elephant graph some competition? Speaking of Branko, here’s his gloriously written review of 15 authors’ attempts to chart a future for social democracy. The son of South Sudan’s President explaining how he got his money. Extraordinary.
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One of my favourite stories of change: how an indigenous group won the rights to 1m hectares of land – and a new interview with an NGO person who supported them at the time

October 26, 2018
If you repeat the same story often enough, at some point you start to wonder if you’ve really just made it up, or at least embellished it beyond recognition. One such story, which I often tell at the start of a How Change Happens presentation, is about the Chiquitano Indians of Bolivia and their successful struggle for land. So I
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One step forward, two steps back? Why WDR 2019 harms the World Bank’s role as a thought leader on employment and gender equality

October 25, 2018
Guest post on the new World Development Report by Shahra Razavi (left) and Silke Staab of the UN Women Research and Data Section. (The views expressed here are in their individual capacities and do not reflect the position of UN Women). Diego Rivera’s 1931 mural, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, makes an alluring cover for
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11 Tips for Better Blogging

October 24, 2018
I’ve run several blogging workshops in recent weeks, with seasoned campaigners at Global Witness, Oxfam Novib’s youth wing, and academic bloggers at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague. All three sessions followed a similar format, developed for a Unicef session I ran last year – a half hour intro from me, and then an editing session where we
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How Change Happens is two years old this week, and Open Access has played a big part in getting people to read it

October 23, 2018
This week is International Open Access Week. It is also two years since we published How Change Happens (How Time Flies….), so here’s a summary of what’s happened since. From a publishing point of view, the most interesting aspect of HCH was that it was open access from day 1. In return for Oxfam waiving its royalties, Oxford University Press
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Links I Liked

October 22, 2018
Honestly, it really isn’t a ‘scary time’ for men. Thanks Lynzy Lab Stewart “Ninety-five percent of economics is common sense.” Ha-Joon Chang in the LSE student paper, on Brexit, trade and Kpop, after launching this year’s series of Friday afternoon guest lectures at the LSE. Details of top line up of future speakers here. It’s only week 1, but I’m
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Legal earthquakes and the struggle against Mining in Mexico

October 19, 2018
Second post from a great visit to Mexico last week to launch the Spanish language edition of How Change Happens. Few things get development folk fired up as much as mining. For many NGOs and grassroots organizations, not much has changed since the Conquistadores: mining is plunder. Given their long history in terms of pollution, community division, and human rights
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Is Something Good about to happen in Mexico?

October 18, 2018
First of two reflections on last week’s visit to Mexico. Omar Cabezas’ wonderful account of the Sandinista Revolution, Fire from the Mountain, ends with the victorious guerrillas arriving in Managua’s main square, where wild celebrations break out at the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. On the margins of the fiesta, a group of comandantes gather and look at each other. 
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Should aid workers and academics fly? Time to vote on the best approach, please.

October 17, 2018
Thea Hilhorst’s post has generated a lot of traffic and interest, so it’s time to push you a bit. We’ve come up with 9 statements reflecting different views of the relative importance of the issue, and the kinds of measures development workers and academics should take. You can select a maximum of 4 of these – those you most strongly
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Is Flying the new Smoking? If so, should aid workers stop flying?

October 17, 2018
Guest post from Dorothea Hilhorst of the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University. She suggested this just after I had got off a plane to Mexico, so I figured I had to publish it…. Update: this post has generated so much interest that we’ve put up an opinion poll here – please complete it after you’ve read this
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