Featured image for “Philanthropy: a History. Kevin Watkins reviews a big new book”

Philanthropy: a History. Kevin Watkins reviews a big new book

December 9, 2020
Guest post from Kevin Watkins Have you ever wondered what links Bono and Bill Gates to Moses, Socrates, Basil the Great, a 4th Century AD bishop in Asia Minor, and the ‘gilded age’ industrialist Andrew Carnegie? Me neither. But Paul Vallely’s magisterial book Philanthropyprovides the answer. Tracing the ties that bind contemporary philanthropists to the Ancient world, the book raises
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Coronavirus as a Catalyst for Global Civil Society: new report

December 8, 2020
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is doing some great research on civil society responses to Covid. It’s latest, published yesterday, is Coronavirus as a Catalyst for Global Civil Society. Its a bit more distanced and neutral than the Civicus work I highlighted recently, and the two approaches complement each other nicely. The Carnegie report’s 94 pages comprise an overview
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Featured image for “Clare Short on the ‘Demise of DFID’ + some other development superstar lectures”

Clare Short on the ‘Demise of DFID’ + some other development superstar lectures

December 7, 2020
When you organize a series of lectures with the rather grandiose title ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’, it really helps if the speaker’s topic is in the news at the time of their talk. So given recent turmoil over the fate of UK aid, when Clare Short rocked up (metaphorically) last week to deliver a lecture entitled
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Featured image for “Development Nutshell: audio round-up (13m) of FP2P posts, w/b 30th November”

Development Nutshell: audio round-up (13m) of FP2P posts, w/b 30th November

December 5, 2020
No excerpt
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Featured image for “How is Climate Change affecting Bolivia ten years on?”

How is Climate Change affecting Bolivia ten years on?

December 4, 2020
Interesting new paper written by James Painter for Oxfam Bolivia, “Bolivia – Climate Change, Inequality and Resilience” (available in both Spanish and English). What’s novel is that this is a follow-up to his 2009 report – I wish more organizations did this kind of thing – building up a longitudinal picture of change, rather than always hopping from issue to
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How has the Pandemic Affected the Ecosystem on Open Government?

December 3, 2020
A thought-provoking new paper from Abigael Bellows and Nada Zohdy on how the pandemic is influencing the ecosystem of advocacy, campaigns and experimentation to promote open government (aka transparency and accountability). Based on interviews with 125 civil society leaders in 20 countries, in a paper published by the Carnegie Endowment, the authors find that the ‘pandemic has generated a surge
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Links I Liked

December 2, 2020
Researchers left 17,000 wallets on the streets of 355 cities, some empty, some with money. Contrary to the predictions of economists, people everywhere were more likely to return wallets with money in them. But rates did vary from country to country. Ht Ethan Mollick ‘Moving mountains’: How Pakistan’s ‘invisible’ women won workers’ rights (‘Bano is paid about 25 Pakistani rupees
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Featured image for “Rubber Ducks for Revolution: the power of humour in protest movements”

Rubber Ducks for Revolution: the power of humour in protest movements

December 1, 2020
I’m loving the theatre of the protests in Thailand. First the adoption of the Hunger Games’ three finger salute, which actually started in 2014, and was promptly banned by the military. In that earlier round of protest, popular culture figures from cartoon hamsters to the Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort were all invoked. Now it’s the hour of the rubber
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