What values should guide Britain’s role in the world, post-Brexit?

March 3, 2020
Oxfam today publishes (with UK think tank, the Foreign Policy Centre) a collection of essays from parliamentarians and policy experts called ‘Finding Britain’s role in a changing world: building a values based foreign policy’. Here are a few highlights from the conclusion, snappily written by Adam Hug, Abigael Baldoumas, Katy Chakrabortty and Danny Sriskandarajah: ‘The extent to which the United
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Research Methodology Klaxon: Lessons from two years of doing ‘Governance Diaries’ in scary places

February 25, 2020
The first outputs are now appearing from ‘Governance Diaries’, a really fascinating new research method that emerged from an initial conversation in a bar in Yangon 4 years ago. If you’re even slightly interested in research, please take a look at this first paper on the emerging methodology, by Miguel Loureiro, Anuradha Joshi, Katrina Barnes and Egídio Chaimite. What are
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Eleven Recommendations for Working on Empowerment and Accountability in messy/dangerous places

February 21, 2020
The Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) programme, which I’ve been sporadically involved with, is now digesting the findings of its first 3 years of research, and has identified some important ‘recurring themes’ across its 5 focus countries (Egypt, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria and Pakistan). The result? Eleven Recommendations for Working on Empowerment and Accountability in Fragile, Conflict or Violence-Affected Settings.
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Six Ways Conflict is Changing, by David Milliband

February 4, 2020
IRC boss David Milliband gave a speech to the ‘West Point Class of 1983’ recently (i.e. US military leaders). The full speech has lots of the protocol stuff required of such set pieces, but also includes his take on ‘six dimensions of change in conflict where we work today’, which I thought were pretty interesting. They are: – The Rise
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Colombian activists use music and art to call for climate action

February 3, 2020
Vanessa Daza Castillo is a young Colombian lawyer working as an environmental justice researcher at Dejusticia, a human rights think tank, and a fellow at the Climate and Environmental Justice Media program with FRIDA – The Young Feminist Fund in partnership with OpenGlobalRights. This piece was published as part of this partnership, by OpenGlobalRights. Social media and school striking are not the
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Why the World Bank is missing out on an Accountability Revolution: Reflections on the Global Partnership for Social Accountability Forum 2019

December 3, 2019
Naomi Hossain of the Accountability Research Center has an out of body experience at the World Bank With raw people power on world-wide display, the Global Partnership for Social Accountability Partners’ Forum 2019 gathered last month at the World Bank in Washington DC for a potentially well-timed discussion of ‘The Challenge of Inclusion’. The GPSA works with 300 partners in
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Why so many Uprisings? Why now?

November 26, 2019
Somethin is happening here: Every day my timeline highlights a different uprising – today it is a national strike in Colombia, with hundreds of thousands protesting in support of the faltering peace process, despite the pouring rain (thanks to Hong Kong, at least umbrellas are cool now). But it could equally well have been Iran, Iraq, Bolivia, Lebanon, Chile, Hong
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8 key Messages on Promoting Empowerment and Accountability in Messy Places

November 20, 2019
Please read the synthesis report for the Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme – it’s written by John Gaventa and Katy Oswald, and is a model for how to communicate a large body of research in an accessible and practitioner-friendly way. (Full disclosure, I’ve contributed four papers to A4EA as part of my Oxfam role, but had nothing
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Counter-terrorism laws are undermining humanitarian relief, and are set to get worse today

November 12, 2019
By Dorothea Hilhorst and Isabelle Desportes of the Institute of Strategic Studies. The Netherlands has recently joined a handful of other Western countries in passing new laws with the hope of stifling terrorist activity and threats. The new legislation on counter-terrorism recently passed by the Dutch Parliament (Tweede Kamer) will be discussed in the Senate (Eerste Kamer) today. Thea Hilhorst
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Four female activists tell us what they need from their international allies

November 5, 2019
As part of Power Shifts, I have started highlighting more grounded perspectives from activists, doers and thinkers around the world that speak to the question of ‘being a feminist in difficult places’. As a mini-series of sorts, I am hoping this conversation highlights how feminism, as well as backlashes against it – although diverse in both approach and outcome – ,
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How to talk about Corruption when it’s everywhere, but invisible?

October 28, 2019
Just got back from 10 days in Goma in DR Congo. No, this post won’t be about Ebola (which mercifully hasn’t taken hold in the city) or conflict (ditto). I was there to interview dozens of officials and NGOs about public services, especially water. And the topic of this post is the difficulty of talking about an omnipresent, but highly
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Why trust and intimacy are vital resources in research

September 12, 2019
Sandrine N’simire is a researcher at the Centre for Public Authority and International Development at the LSE. She discusses the challenge of building trust between researchers and respondents during research in Goma, DRC, and the eventual benefits from approaches that embrace trial and error.This post forms part of a series exploring Going Against the Flow, an ongoing project on water governance
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