I’m spending the summer lull updating How Change Happens and am coming across some really interesting stuff. To update the book’s case study on the Paris Climate Summit of 2015, Irene Guijt sent over ‘A short history of the successes and failures of the international climate change negotiations’ an excellent (open access) paper by Mark Maslin, John Lang and Fiona

Your weekly reminder that, as twitter dies (and turns into an absurdly sinister X – what is that about?), I’m moving some activity to Linked In – please follow. Potholes Activists seem be particularly creative and effective. Here’s Joe Coughlan in Bromley, South London. Much ruder versions also get results, apparently. The torrent of opinion pieces on AI (some of

Links I LikedSchool children are bearing the brunt of the global hunger crisis – just feed themHow the United Nations and the World Bank can turbo charge the effort to reduce InequalityEvaluating the Evaluations: What lessons can Oxfam draw from a Decade of Scrutiny?

Propaganda and opinion are easy; establishing the truth is hard (and I speak here as someone once branded Oxfam’s ‘chief opinionator’ – thanks John Magrath). Oxfam has been wrestling with different ways to evaluate impact for decades and in a new paper, a team led by Katrina Barnes ploughed through 67 ‘Effectiveness Reviews’ – rigorous impact evaluations on randomly selected

Guest post from Oxfam’s Anthony Kamande Over the past decade, many leading economists and global institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have taken a keen interest in economic inequality. Tons of inequality data have been unearthed, and inequality is now on ordinary people’s lips. Indeed, in 2015 the UN adopted

Kevin Watkins introduces a new paper on a crucial topic Governments will this week gather in Rome for a UN event with one of those titles designed to induce profound boredom. The FAO is marking the second anniversary of the 2021 World Food System Summit with a ‘Stocktaking Moment’. Yes, I know, those two words feel like a good enough

Twitter seems v tired/evil right now, so I have started an FP2P LinkedIn page. Not quite sure what I’ll do with it yet, apart from link to new FP2P posts. All suggestions welcome (plus please follow!). A new league table analyses the disclosure and performance of 60 of the world’s largest global food and beverage companies on their efforts to

Links I Liked The methodology behind Oxfam’s latest killer fact on companies $1 trillion in windfall profits Some good news on falling global poverty levels (the multi-dimensional kind) Devoted the last week’s posts to a new book, How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research: The Art of Informing and Impacting Policy. Lot of stuff to chew on in here, for those of us

One particular chapter in How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research felt particularly relevant to me. For some years, I have been working with Exfamer Jane Lonsdale, in Tanzania, Myanmar and now in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where she helps run a big Aussie-funded programme on citizen engagement. I support Jane and the teams she works with by commenting

My favourite chapter in How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research (in addition to the one on Critical Friends which goes up tomorrow) was by Alice Owen, a prof at Leeds university, on ‘Supporting policy towards sustainability’. It’s a lovely reflection from a senior academic on the lessons she has learned in engaging with policy makers over the years.

Edited by a bunch of UK academics (Oxford Brookes and Manchester), this book is a gold mine for anyone interested in research for impact (R4I) – the holy grail (at least in terms of lip service) of much of modern academia. Best thing I’ve read on the subject, with something for more or less everyone, so I’m going to devote

The annual Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report, jointly published since 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), came out this week. The 2010 bit is important – the MPI has now been going long enough to start to identify trends in the nature of more nuanced, holistic (poverty plus) deprivation