September 30, 2020
Kate Raworth launches a brilliant, potentially world-shaping, new initiative This week is the online launch of Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL). At the heart of it is a community platform, open to everyone who wants to turn Doughnut Economics from a radical idea into transformative action. We’ll be co-creating tools and sharing stories of how to build regenerative and distributive
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What do we learn from using Political Economy Analysis in 13 national health and education programmes?
September 29, 2020
If you’re interested in Thinking and Working Politically, or the use of Political Economy Analysis (PEA) in aid and development, then do please follow the Governance and Development Soapbox, run by the team at Abt. I’ve re-posted quite a few of its blogposts, by Graham Teskey, Lavinia Tyrrel and others, but it also has some excellent working papers and briefing
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Lest we forget: Why investments in hygiene, sanitation and water are key to fighting COVID-19
September 28, 2020
Guest post by Muyatwa Sitali, Head of Country Engagement, Sanitation and Water for All COVID-19 has taught us that a world where nearly half of its population do not have what they need to properly wash their hands at critical times is not a safe world. We are delicately and dangerously connected. A disease which started in one city has
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Here’s the Manual and Reading List for my LSE Course on advocacy, campaigning and grassroots activism. Please critique/improve/steal.
September 25, 2020
Sincerest form of flattery and all that. Inspired by Alice Evans’ bookification of her course reading list, Tom Kirk and I have turned the reading list for our LSE course on advocacy, campaigning and grassroots activism into a course manual, adding more background, a summary of each week’s content and seminar questions, among other things. Here it is – all
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Feminist solidarity networks have multiplied since the COVID-19 outbreak in Mexico
September 24, 2020
Last up in this short series of ’emergent agency’ case studies from the Interface Journal. María Jose Ventura Alfaro describes how independent feminist collectives in Mexico have created solidarity networks across the country to tackle the gravest socioeconomic consequences of the virus at the local level: shortages of food, medicine, and other essential products and an upsurge in domestic and
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‘Anti-domestic violence little vaccine’: A Wuhan-based feminist activist campaign during COVID-19
September 23, 2020
Hongwei Bao argues that rather than seeing the pandemic as an obstacle to social movements, it can be a good opportunity to experiment with flexible and creative modes of social and political activism. This piece is a shortened version of a paper in the Interface Journal. From January to April, many Chinese cities including Wuhan were locked down in a
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From communal violence to lockdown hunger – Emergency responses by civil society networks in Delhi
September 22, 2020
We’ve had an amazing response to our launch of the project on ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid‘, and are now processing all the contacts and info we’ve received. For those wanting examples of the kinds of experiences we are interested in, I’ll be posting some examples over the next few days. First up, Sobhi Mohanty argues that the
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Links I Liked
September 21, 2020
America’s mean streets where people….. have dinner ht Rex Chapman The OECD has just published its annual States of Fragility report. Mega number crunch/overview across multiple dimensions. Full disclosure: I’m on the reference group. Decolonizing the commentariat contact list. Brilliant researchers and commentators from across Africa who can provide exceptional insights and expertise on key issues. Change in the humanitarian
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Development Nutshell: round-up (15m) of FP2P posts, w/b 14th September
September 19, 2020
No excerpt
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How to Monitor and Evaluate an Adaptive Programme: 7 Takeaways
September 18, 2020
I generally try to avoid ‘inside baseball’ aid discussions that make sense mainly to practitioners, but this piece by Gloria Sikustahili, Julie Adkins, Japhet Makongo & Simon Milligan was so interesting and sensible, I made an exception. We’ve all been there. We’ve drowned in the weight of programme documentation; the need to capture everything, to report everything, to be seen
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The Hidden Life of Theories of Change
September 17, 2020
We’re getting down and aid-wonky for the next couple of days. First up, ToCs: I’ve gone through a personal hype cycle on Theories of Change – first getting excited and extolling their virtues, and then starting to have second thoughts as I saw them turn from a tool that encourages imagination and experimentation into a bit of a tickbox ‘logframe
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How to vlog – top examples and advice from some very tech savvy students
September 16, 2020
Final instalment from my amazing LSE students. Earlier posts ran some of their blogs, which were part of their assignment to write an influencing strategy on a topic of their choice. But I gave them the option of doing a video blog (vlog) instead, and several of them grabbed it, with some impressive results. Here are three of the best,
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