Ben Ramalingam introduces his new book In Upshift: Turning Pressure into Performance and Crisis into Creativity, I set out to explore how stress, pressure and crisis can be transformed into performance and creativity through a process that I call ‘Upshifting’. This book was originally inspired by my work on humanitarian innovation. But as I researched and learned, the scope expanded

Following on yesterday’s post on a new guide to Systems Thinking and Practice, this was the last and most interesting of my Christmas break catch-up reads. It also had the longest title. In full: ‘The Systems Work of Social Change: How to Harness Connection, Context, and Power to Cultivate Deep and Enduring Change’. (I think the punctuation is wrong, but

If you hang around conversations on ‘thinking and working politically’, as I do, you’ll hear a lot of references to ‘Political Settlements’ as it’s grown up, more academic, but sometimes incomprehensible cousin. As this new book’s blurb declares ‘At its most ambitious, ‘political settlements analysis’ (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions for their successful

Neil McCulloch introduces his new book Hands up if you would like petrol prices to go up?  I’m guessing not too many hands.  The cripplingly high costs of energy (whether petrol, diesel, gas or coal as well as electricity) have posed a huge challenge for households and firms all around the world.  Massive increases in these costs, driven by the

Guest post from Laura Adams, Director of Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning at CSM-STAND, a USAID-funded global civil society and media program, led by Pact. When international development programs want people to get vaccinated, the behavior they are targeting is clear, even if the complex set of things that influence that behavior take time and effort to address. Social and

Spoke on a panel last week in UCL’s Policy and Practice lecture series. The topic was Nina Hall’s new book, Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (putting in the discount code ASFLYQ6 will get you 30% off, btw). Some thoughts. The book explores a new-ish generation of digital advocacy organizations with professional staff. MoveOn was the first, established in the

The aid sector and academia do a pretty terrible job of describing real life in poor countries. You’ll struggle to find joy, fun, hobbies, parties, chilling, crazy stuff that makes no ‘sense’. Even sex is usually portrayed as a ‘risk factor’. Short of living somewhere, accessing that other side of life requires reading novels, poetry, or watching films or theatre.

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

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

Why We Fight, by Chris Blattman, a prof at the University of Chicago, is shaping up to be this year’s Big Book – it’s everywhere on my timeline, the FT book of the summer etc etc. A summary and some thoughts. Usually I decide early on if I like a book or not, on the basis of a) does it

Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India by Rajesh Veeraraghavan is a wonderful and important book, a deep dive into the world’s largest social protection programme – India’s NREGA scheme – to explore the interaction between state reformers and citizen activists, as they work together, or sometimes against each other, to overcome the local politics of caste, capture,

Stefan Dercon introduces his new book, published today in the UK (review to follow) I am starting to appreciate why historians rarely study contemporary history. Interpreting the present is always hard. I have felt this weight in my two core activities over the last two years: providing advice on global affairs and development issues pertaining to development to a politician,