Featured image for “Claire Melamed on Data, Power and Sustainable Development”

Claire Melamed on Data, Power and Sustainable Development

January 10, 2024
For this podcast, I sat down a few months ago to discuss data and development with Claire Melamed, who runs the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Apologies for delay, Claire – got caught up in internal traffic. Also apologies for length of this transcript – turns out 30m talking = 2 blog length pieces. Duncan: Like any good Englishman,
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How Blogs can Change Government Policy

December 19, 2023
Now the LSE term is over, I’ve been catching up with the backlog of The Economist and Prospect (my two print subscriptions). One Economist piece caught my eye – ‘How to Change the Policy of the British Government’. The answer is apparently….blogging! ‘To wangle £11bn ($14bn) out of the British government, it helps to write a blog post. “Full expensing”, which
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Whoop Whoop. Just made a personal Webpage it’s super easy.

October 26, 2023
Prodded by my LSE department, I finally got round to creating a personal webpage this week. As well as an exercise in gross narcissism, it’s super helpful (for me) to have a single place to direct any enquiries, and remind myself (and perhaps others) about stuff I’ve done and forgotten – distant past, random interviews, papers I’ve co-authored but didn’t
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Featured image for “Finishing a 2nd Edition of How Change Happens – here are drafts of two new chapters for you to read. Comments please!”

Finishing a 2nd Edition of How Change Happens – here are drafts of two new chapters for you to read. Comments please!

September 26, 2023
I spent the summer toiling away on updating How Change Happens. Luckily the weather was pretty rubbish, so I didn’t resent it too much. Most of the chapter updates were just that – adding more recent stats, a few new references, a generally more sombre take, given that the first edition appeared just months before Brexit and Trump. But there
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Book Review: Power and Progress. Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

September 14, 2023
I started reading Power and Progress in a fairly sceptical frame of mind, because I didn’t much like Why Nations Fail. But it won me over in the end, especially the final chapter on what to do about the current tech clusterfxck of AI, filter bubbles, mis- and disinformation, gig economy exploitation etc etc. Main message: Since roughly 1980, something
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So I asked ChatGPT to write about the pros and cons of AI for International Development. What do you think?

May 22, 2023
In response to Friday’s post on AI and Development, PS Baker asked when FP2P would publish its first AI generated post. Here you go. My Question: Write a 600 word blogpost on the risks and opportunities of AI for international development, in the style of Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog ChatGPT’s response: ‘Introduction: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged
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How do we Start Thinking About AI and Development?

May 19, 2023
Spent a mind-bending day this week discussing AI and development with some NGO and legal folk (Chatham House Rule, so that’s all I can say, sorry). Everyone in the room knew at least ten times more than me on the subject. Perfect. Some impressions/ideas. The catalyst for the discussion was the UK Government’s new White Paper on AI and Innovation,
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ChatGPT: implications for teaching, how it analyses Brexit and the link to Psychoanalysis

April 27, 2023
ChatGPT. Discuss. Isn’t everyone? Right now, everyone seems to be playing with it, writing and/or worrying about it and with good reason. Some are already losing their jobs after publishing faked interviews. There are refuseniks – this is crowdsourced plagiarism and must be kept at bay. Students must not use it. Massive health warnings etc etc. That feels both King
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Book Review: Africa 2.0: Inside a Continent’s Communications Revolution

January 5, 2023
Been catching up with my reading backlog over the Christmas break…. According to the publisher’s blurb ‘Africa 2.0 provides an important history of how two technologies – mobile calling and internet – were made available to millions of sub-Saharan Africans, and the impact they have had on their lives. The book deals with the political challenges of liberalisation and privatisation
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Book Review: Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era.

October 26, 2022
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
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Is Social Media a New Frontier for Marginalised Communities to Challenge Old Power? The Flint Water Tragedy, and the Power of Place-Based Digital Activism

February 3, 2022
In the second of their four-part blog series (first published on Global Policy), which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor (two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort), use Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to ask how activists can use the internet to achieve new forms of power and
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New and Old Power: A New Way to Understand and Cultivate Digitally-Mediated Activism, or Just Another Framework?

February 2, 2022
This is the first of a four-part blog series first published on Global Policy, which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism. Written by two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor, it uses Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to interrogate power: asking how activists can use the internet to
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