Yesterday I summarized the thinking behind an important new toolkit on adaptive management. In this second post, I want to have a look at the tools themselves. These come in the form of 15 ‘guidance notes’. The 15 notes cover the 3 elements of Adaptive Management that Angela Christie and I identified a couple of years ago – adaptive governance,

In recent years, I’ve been one of a crowd of people thinking and pontificating about ‘adaptive management’. The debate has been rather dominated by academics and thinktankers, fond of hand-waving generalizations and rather better at taking down the bad stuff that suggesting what might replace it. In those conversations, Graham Teskey has played the role of the stroppy practitioner, demanding

Continuing on the theme of how aid agencies can work better in fragile and conflict affected settings (FCAS), there’s a new e-book (Advocacy in Context) looking at the work of national NGOs in South Sudan, Nigeria, Burundi, Central African Republic and Afghanistan. The researchers, Margit van Wessel, Wenny Ho, Edwige Marty and Peter Tamas, talked to local partners of the

Guest post by Tom Kirk For the last few years, I’ve co-delivered an MA module on influencing, activism and campaigning with Duncan at the LSE. For the last lecture, we always ask students what two topics they would like us to delve into in more depth. They’ve plumped for everything from leadership and how INGOs are responding to critics, to

I’ve been bouncing some ideas around with Irene Guijt on how aid agencies can/should work in what we call ‘fragile and conflict-affected settings’ (FCAS). This matters because FCAS are where a lot of the aid business (both donors and INGOs) will end up, as more stable countries grow their way out of aid dependence (and a good thing too). Let’s

Guest post by Rory Horner (University of Manchester) and Ken Shadlen (LSE) Various UK media reports have blamed lower than expected supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India for a slowing of the UK’s vaccination programme, especially delaying immunisation of the under-50s. Although five million doses of vaccines produced by the Serum Institute of India were dispatched from India to

This post by my LSE colleague Tom Kirk is part of a series exploring ‘public authority’ based on research at LSE’s Centre for Public Authority and International Development at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa. It was first published on the Africa at LSE blog A ‘public authorities’ lens seeks to understand the full range of actors claiming power and governing people in the

Guest post by Seb Rumsby As our world becomes increasingly globalised, there are now more and more chances for people from vastly unequal economic situations to meet and connect – be it through tourism, migration or social media. At the same time, we are witnessing a widespread disillusionment with so-called ‘experts’ and technocrats in the realms of politics and international

Here’s a sentence you don’t often hear. I just read a really interesting conference report. Transforming Change: How Change Really Happens and What we can do about it, by Paul Knox Clarke, summarizes a big 2017 discussion on the drivers of change in the humanitarian system, as well as the blockers. I reported on it at the time, but went

Guest post by UNICEF’s Laurence Chandy One salvation of the COVID-19 pandemic is that children have been largely spared from severe infections. Yet the broader effects of the crisis on the young have already caused untold harm and are now poised to reset the forces that have driven progress for the world’s children since the start of this century.    Children,

Words, words, words. In snowbound lockdown I process thousands of them every day, writing them, reading them, tweaking them. And spotting odd patterns, and layers of obfuscation and general slipperiness. Here are a few thoughts (I’m not doing standard devspeak rants here – plenty of those already on the blog), aided and abetted by crowdsourcing on twitter. Sprinkler words Sprinkler

Guest post by Florencia Guerzovich, Soledad Gattoni, and Dave Algoso Anyone working for change knows that timing matters. You can see your efforts stall and spin for years, before finally you break through. What made that possible? Sometimes it’s your persistence, wearing down opposition like water carving a canyon. But sometimes it’s a change that came from outside your work—a