Featured image for “Top Tips and Dilemmas in Influencing from seven senior Aid Leaders”

Top Tips and Dilemmas in Influencing from seven senior Aid Leaders

October 25, 2022
Last in the current snapshots of the GELI Influencing programme I’ve been leading this year. We’ve had blogs on all the other elements – the Face to Face meetings, the ‘user experience’, the podcasts with experts. Here’s a write up (Chatham House rule) of the missing piece – the online modules, in this case on analysis. 7 senior aid folk
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Featured image for “SoupGate, the radical flank and the politics of good taste ”

SoupGate, the radical flank and the politics of good taste 

October 20, 2022
You’ve probably seen the Just Stop Oil protesters throwing tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery this week – the video on Twitter has over 35 million views, and everyone is talking about it. In particular, a big debate about whether this is just vandalism or smart protest. Tom Aston reflects. In an interesting blog, James Ozden criticizes those talking heads in the UK
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Featured image for “‘Think Chess not Checkers’: Wilf Mwamba on the role of Analysis in effective Influencing”

‘Think Chess not Checkers’: Wilf Mwamba on the role of Analysis in effective Influencing

October 18, 2022
For our Global Executive Leadership Initiative training on influencing, I interviewed Wilf Mwamba, a long term FCDO/DFID practitioner-thinker on TWP, now working in the private sector. With GELI’s permission, I’m reposting here, along with an abbreviated transcript. The podcast is 25 minutes – well worth it, IMO. WM: I work for DAI Global, a US international consultancy firm. I’m leading a
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Featured image for “Ha-Joon Chang on Economics v Science Fiction and other great ways to end your weeks this autumn – the LSE’s Cutting Edge lectures are back”

Ha-Joon Chang on Economics v Science Fiction and other great ways to end your weeks this autumn – the LSE’s Cutting Edge lectures are back

October 6, 2022
Ha-Joon Chang on Economics v Science Fiction, and other great ways to end your weeks this autumn – the LSE’s Cutting Edge lectures are back Heads up for this year’s LSE ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’ lecture series, which kicks off next Friday (14th October). We’re moving into hybrid mode this year, with a mix of online
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Why and how the UN and NGOs need to work together at national level

October 5, 2022
Two participants from our recent influencing training in Panama (Thomas Dunmore Rodriguez, National Influencing Adviser at Oxfam, and Alice Shackelford, UN Resident Coordinator in Honduras) discuss what they learned and the implications for more effective advocacy A couple of weeks ago the GELI course on Influencing for Senior Leaders brought representatives from the UN and several national and international NGOs
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Featured image for “What did we learn from six months of training senior Aid people in Influencing?”

What did we learn from six months of training senior Aid people in Influencing?

October 4, 2022
Well that was intense. We’ve just come to the end of a one year programme to design and deliver a training course on ‘influencing’ to senior aid leaders (UN, INGOs, Red Cross/Crescent and National NGOs). 6 months to design the materials and methodology; the rest to deliver the training to 6 cohorts of 25 people in 5 locations around the
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Which is worse, bad Zoom or bad In-Real-Life?

September 30, 2022
Since in-real-life contact resumed, I have been to some classically terrible academic seminars (which took me back to this 2016 cathartic rant). Here are my notes from one recent purgatorial experience: ‘Forgotten just how bad academic seminars can be (come back Covid, all is forgiven!): Not reading the room (full of people who know the context), so they spend most
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Using Evidence: What Can We Learn from a Book about Parenting?

September 1, 2022
Guest post from Shruti Patel Emily Oster, an economist, mother of two, and one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people, wants parenting to be treated like a profession. How? By getting them to make data-driven decisions about their kids. In her latest book, The Family Firm she translates decades of research on how key decisions (e.g., on after-school care
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Book Review: Gambling on Development, by Stefan Dercon

August 30, 2022
Ah the summer reading backlog. A hammock, sunshine (lots of it) and some good books. Top of my reviews list this year was Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose, by Stefan Dercon. He summarized his book on this blog back in May, but I wanted to read (and review) it for myself. Dercon is a big
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Featured image for “Summer Student blog and campaign: Why you have to care about elephants in Botswana”

Summer Student blog and campaign: Why you have to care about elephants in Botswana

August 25, 2022
Last but not least in this summer series of posts from my LSE activism class, Jonathan Swinney (full project on which this post is based here) When I think about elephants, my mind wanders off to Dumbo – a fictional elephant loved by millions around the world. In 1941, some people thought we would never see him again. But he
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Featured image for “Summer Student vlog and campaign: Plane to Train UK: Incentivizing and Promoting Domestic Train Travel ”

Summer Student vlog and campaign: Plane to Train UK: Incentivizing and Promoting Domestic Train Travel 

August 24, 2022
My students have the option to vlog or blog on their project – developing a campaign strategy about something they are passionate about. Here’s Jenna Thoretz’ vlog on her campaign to get people to switch from planes to trains on internal travel in the UK. Full campaign strategy here.
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Student Summer vlog and campaign: Tackling period poverty in France

August 23, 2022
Next up in this series of posts from my LSE activism students, Alexia Fageroux, who went with a sound-off vlog option for her assignment. Full project on which her vlog is based here. Next week, back to boring old me – sorry!
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