This detailed (113 page main report, plus annexes) ODI study by Laure-Hélène Piron, Clare Cummings, Gareth Williams, Helen Derbyshire and Sierd Hadley digs into one of those celebrity/Potemkin governance programmes that you keep coming across (and which I keep writing about on these pages). In this case a large UK investment in governance reforms in four states in Nigeria (Jigawa,

By Mary A. Kabati, Ronah K. Lubinda, Adela Materu, Kingsley Makuwila, Jones Mwalwanda, Prosper Ndaiga and Moses Zulu If COVID-19 and the recent uprisings for racial justice around the world have made one thing clear, it is this: the global development sector needs to radically rebuild itself from the ground up. As leaders of community-based organizations in Tanzania, Zambia, and

Regular FP2P readers will know by now that I’ve been following Myanmar quite a lot, and some of the conversations have been both interesting and of much broader relevance. Recently I had a call with some researchers who adapted governance diaries work first to the pandemic, and then to the coup. Diaries involve local researchers returning to the same individuals

Amber Parkes, Anam Parvez Butt, Marion Sharples and Vivian Schwarz-Blum talks us through an important new advocacy tool – the Care Policy Scorecard Everything gets a rating these days: apps, hotels, Uber journeys. And everyone wants that five-star rating. But what about government policies that affect people’s lives? What if we could rate them too, according to how impactful and

In their final instalment on Oxfam’s Inspiring Radically Better Futures project, Irene Guijt and Ruth Mayne summarize the main findings. We thank the inspired, courageous and determined people involved in the Inspiring Better Futures case studies who have shown that radically better futures are within reach. Many people around the world have generously given their time and contributed to the

In their second post on Oxfam’s Inspiring Futures project, Irene Guijt and Ruth Mayne nerd out on the methodology. If hope is stronger when anchored in evidence, what does it take to create that evidence base? There were plenty of head scratching moments involved in answering our main question: What evidence exists that transformative and inclusive change at scale is

Irene Guijt and Ruth Mayne introduce ‘Inspiring Radically Better Futures’, a new Oxfam research programme. With COP26 looming, everyone is hoping again. We hope that world leaders will make the bold decisions needed to reduce the scale of inevitable climate change. But what Sarah Palin once memorably called ‘that hopey changey stuff’ has gotten a hard rap recently. Take Greta

My Oxfam colleague and regular FP2P contributor Max Lawson (right) sends out a weekly summary of his reading on inequality (he leads Oxfam’s advocacy work on it). They’re great, and Max has opened his mailing list up to the anyone who’s interested – just email max.lawson@oxfam.org, with ‘subscribe’ in the subject line. Here’s his latest effort (and thanks to Rakesh Rajani for suggesting the

Throughout the pandemic, social protection practitioners have been drawing on past experience and established ‘mantras’ to support governments and emergency actors to respond to the crisis. Valentina Barca, the Team Lead for the FCDO-GIZ-DFAT-funded SPACE service shares reflections on whether and how these mantras have been taken up. COVID-19 caught us all by surprise. The social protection sector was no exception. Often

What are the most prevalent unintended effects of international cooperation? Dirk Jan Koch, together with the Center for Global Challenges of Utrecht University, analyzed all project evaluations by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs since the turn of the century. Here’s the top 10. The figures in brackets show the number of

Guest post by a friend working on Myanmar, who for obvious reasons would prefer to remain anonymous In a fast-moving violent crisis like the one in Myanmar, a lot of the most interesting analysis goes unpublished for obvious reasons – the safety of individuals or organizations. I’ve been working with a (suitably anonymous) national and international team on a series

I loved this blistering twitter thread by Justin Podur (@justinpodur) so much, I turned into a blogpost for the untwittered. ‘(In homage to Binyavanga Wainaina) First, the opening. All good articles about Afghanistan start with a few lines from a poem by British imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling. You know the one, “the women come out to cut up what remains,