Will the real megatrend please stand up? Insights from a scan of scans

January 31, 2020
Filippo Artuso and Irene Guijt introduce their new Oxfam discussion paper When it comes to global futures, we have information of what could be, yet are largely in the dark about what will be. To shed some light, we compared 22 recent scans of powerful global trends – or megatrends. This helps give us some tools for thought about options,
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Links I Liked

January 30, 2020
Trust Filipinos to take the piss out of SWEDOW (Stuff We Don’t Want). 30 Funny Pics Of Filipinos Dressed Up In Ridiculous Donated Clothes At A Volcano Evacuation Centre ht Tobias Denskus Davos saw some important additions to our understanding of inequality. The new UNDP Human Development Report covered Inequalities in human development in the 21st century. While the latest
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Everyone is talking about Coronavirus, but why does the World do so little about Pneumonia, which kills 2,000 children a day?

January 29, 2020
Guest post by Kevin Watkins, CEO of Save the Children UK The world is in the grip of a pneumonia emergency – and, no, I’m not only talking about the coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan, China. While public health authorities struggle to contain the potentially lethal SARS-like viral agent – nCoV2019, as it is known – childhood pneumonia is
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What lies behind the phony war over Inequality Statistics?

January 28, 2020
Max Lawson, Patricia Espinoza and Franziska Mager on the background to last week’s inequality debates at Davos. Is the gap between the rich and poor really increasing? That’s a question that has gained increasing importance, not least because in a recent front page article the Economist magazine challenged the high profile evidence presented by the economists Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman
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Why is Road Traffic not more of a development issue? It’s killing 1.25m (mainly poor) people a year.

January 27, 2020
If there was a disease that killed three times more people than malaria, nearly all of them in developing countries, and yet a cure was readily available, don’t you think the aid agencies would be falling over themselves to do something? So why is road traffic in some different category? Kudos to the Economist for regularly drawing attention to the
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Featured image for “Feminism at Davos; MLK’s top tips on activism: Audio summary of FP2P posts w/b 20th January”

Feminism at Davos; MLK’s top tips on activism: Audio summary of FP2P posts w/b 20th January

January 25, 2020
No excerpt
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The inside story on how Rwanda removed VAT on sanitary products

January 24, 2020
Guest post by Ynis Isimbi, first posted on the LSE International Development blog [note from Duncan: This made my week – a former student of my LSE course on advocacy and campaigns got in touch to say Rwanda’s just done the thing she was calling for in her student project, then interviewed its Minister of Health to find out why/how
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Martin Luther King on the rules of non-violent protest, just v unjust laws and his disappointment with the white moderate

January 23, 2020
It was Martin Luther King day this week, and Save the Kids boss Kevin Watkins tweeted a link to King’s 1963 letter from Birmingham city jail, describing it as ‘a hymn for our times and a reminder of the ties that bind us’. So I took a look. It’s beautifully written, deeply moving, and gives some powerful analytical insights into
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Why do some bits of the State function, even in Messed Up Places? Review of ‘The Politics of Public Sector Performance’

January 22, 2020
The Politics of Public Sector Performance, edited by Michael Roll, brings together some fascinating research on ‘Pockets of Effectiveness’ in developing countries. PoEs are public organizations that ‘deliver public goods and services relatively effectively … scattered islands in seas of administrative ineffectiveness and corruption.’ This kind of approach has a lot to recommend it – a kind of institutional positive
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What do we know about Developmental Leaders? What questions should we be asking?

January 21, 2020
The Developmental Leadership Program is an intriguing research initiative, which I’ve been loosely associated with for many years. Founded in 2006 and largely funded by the Australian aid programme, they recently produced four ‘foundational papers’ summarizing where they’ve got to and what questions they think researchers and practitioners should now be asking on the thorny question of leadership. This is
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Can we Get Davos talking about the Care Economy and Feminist Economics?

January 20, 2020
Davos is here again, which is always a fun time to be working for Oxfam. Every January, the world’s political and economic leaders jet in to Switzerland, and we try to persuade them, and their press entourage, to focus on the way that growing inequality is holding back global poverty reduction. This kicked off in 2014 with ‘85 richest people
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Featured image for “Change in the UK and decolonizing Academia – round up (14m) of FP2P posts wb 13th January”

Change in the UK and decolonizing Academia – round up (14m) of FP2P posts wb 13th January

January 18, 2020
No excerpt
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