There has been a spate of recent reports on localization, especially in humanitarian response. (Has anyone done a synthesis?) I’ve been browsing through a few – some highlights. First, an obvious, but important point. ‘Localization’ has always been a feature of emergency response, since long before today’s aid system was dreamt of. Globalization and migration have added new twists: ‘instances

Jordi Vaquer is the Director for Global Foresight and Analysis at the Open Society Foundations The radical uncertainty resulting from the crises triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic makes prediction harder than ever and, yet, there has rarely been a time where everyone – thinkers and parents, artists and bankers, activists and teachers – had to confront urgent questions about the

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I recently skyped Deepak Nayyar, Professor of Economics at India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to discuss his new book, Resurgent Asia You start with an economist called Gunnar Myrdal, who 50 years ago wrote a book saying that Asia was doomed! Myrdal had a European perspective of Asia, with almost no history. For him, Asia began really at the end of

There’s an interesting pattern that emerges from the coverage of how different countries have performed in their Covid-19 response: it is greatly influenced by their experience of previous disease outbreaks:  Kerala had Nipah, which made all the difference according to this piece in The Guardian China had SARS and South Korea had MERS West Africa, Uganda and DRC had Ebola But the worst-hit

The UK government’s decision to merge DFID and the Foreign Office may be depressing, as I wrote last week, but it has triggered some interesting responses. These include an excellent political obituary from DFID lifer Phil Mason; some straw clutchism from Malcolm Chalmers at RUSI (who thinks DFID will swallow FCO, not the other way round, because its budget is

‘White saviour complex’, ‘poverty porn’, ‘locals’ vs. ‘expats’. These terms are all part of an old conversation that has revived as a result of the mass protests calling for racial justice and anti-racism across the US and globally. Racism in development and aid is not a new issue, so why does it continue to be overlooked? Sadly, I’ve noticed a notable silence from

This post is co-authored with Irene Guijt If we agree that evidence-informed policy and practice are good things, we need to think about what kind of research gets commissioned. Some kinds of research are definitely more useful than others.  We’ve been discussing the urgent needs in Covid research with Heather Marquette (after her great April FP2P posts on this) and

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Guest post by Julien Landry and Ann Marie Smith What is possible today that was not possible before the pandemic? In early April, we brought together (on Zoom, of course) over a dozen seasoned activists, advocates and governance practitioners working on the ground in ten countries to share how COVID-19 is affecting them, their work, and their own learning as

Last week I sat down with Danny Sriskandarajah, who is leading Oxfam GB through its current upheaval. Here are some extracts, but do please listen to the full 25 minutes if you can. So Danny, you’re a year and a half into the job. People will have been watching with interest as you came in as a surprise choice –

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Marcus Rashford’s campaign to get an extension of free school meal vouchers for 1.3m kids during the summer holiday. And I’m glad he got the UK government to reverse its position. But what does it say about that government when, on the same day it performed a U-turn on welfare policy