What do 13,000 children in 46 countries have to tell us about living with COVID-19?

September 10, 2020
Guest post by Save the Children International’s Melissa Burgess and Michael O’Donnell The world is certainly not lacking in research on COVID-19. But there have been gaps in empirical data showing the lived experience of people around the world. Today, Save the Children is filling some of those gaps with the release of the findings from an unprecedented study, asking
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Launching a new Research and Action programme on ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid’. Want to join us?

September 9, 2020
Mutual aid groups morphing into long term citizens’ organizations; women’s organizations forming to address the surge in domestic violence during lockdown; small producers switching to producing protective equipment for health and care workers. Across the world, people are responding to the pandemic at a local level by acting, organizing and learning. What kinds of patterns can be identified in this
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Links I Liked

September 8, 2020
Tomorrow (Wednesday) I’ll be speaking on a panel on drugs and development to launch a series: ‘A World with Drugs: Legal Regulation through a Development lens’. As Helen Clark is kicking it off, I’ll mainly be doing ‘what she said’. Q to readers tho – the ‘drugs and development’ lobby has been pushing major organizations to mainstream the issue for
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Why you should care about Sea Turtles

September 7, 2020
Next up from some of the best student posts from my LSE activism course is this piece by Mirna Medina-Silva Whenever I read about sea turtles, my mind hears “duuude!” … you know from Finding Nemo? Unfortunately, unlike Nemo, turtles may soon be lost forever to Nicaragua. In 2019, for the first time, you couldn’t find Leatherback turtles in Nicaragua.
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Development Nutshell: round-up (18m) of FP2P posts, w/b 24th and 31st August

September 5, 2020
And below is the graphic I promised
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Book Review: ‘Thinking and Working Politically in Development’

September 4, 2020
‘Thinking and Working Politically in Development’, by John Sidel and Jaime Faustino, is a new book on one of my favourite ‘Thinking and Working Politically’ programmes – Coalitions for Change (CfC) in the Philippines. It’s not the most user-friendly (no exec sum, no index), but at least it’s open access – download here. I’ve written about CfC on the blog
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London’s Toxic Tube and what to do about it

September 3, 2020
I thought I’d post some of the top blog posts from this year’s students in my LSE class on ‘Advocacy, Campaigning and Grassroots activism‘. Their individual assignment was to design a campaign strategy for a cause close to their hearts, and write a blog about it. Here’s Lucy Shearer presenting her campaign to clean up London’s underground. If like me,
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What is Political Economy Analysis (PEA) and why does it matter in development?

September 2, 2020
Another great piece/links round-up from Graham Teskey – an internal briefing at his workplace (Abt) that he’s happy for me to share  Political economy analysis (PEA) refers to a body of theory and practice that was first identified by the great economists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Indeed, economics was originally termed ‘political economy’. It was only when mathematics
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What have 5 years of tax campaigns achieved?

September 1, 2020
Guest post by Oliver Pearce In early 2016, I joined Oxfam GB to lead its tax work. As I now prepare to leave Oxfam, a lot has changed in the world of tax (and the wider world too!). Early 2016 was before the Brexit referendum, the Trump presidency, England’s men joining the women’s team by winning the cricket world cup,
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Links I Liked

August 31, 2020
Data, Knowledge, Wisdom and other stuff. ht Peter Baker ‘Research in conflict settings is like living with a constant risk of getting burned. As researchers, we grow accustomed to the burns; we even begin to trivialise them. Until the day we realise that our skin no longer heals.’ An Ansoms on the LSE Africa blog What Have We Learned from
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Cracks in the knowledge system: whose knowledge is valued in a pandemic and beyond?

August 28, 2020
Guest post by Jon Harle Many of the inequities which COVID-19 has exposed – and exacerbated – have been with us for a long time.  Setting aside very stark disparities in access to health services, and the ability to maintain decent livelihoods, COVID has shown us once again the processes of exclusion that are baked into the ways in which
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3 advocacy case studies I would love to read (on long term norm shifts). Anyone fancy writing them?

August 27, 2020
On the off chance that someone is looking for an interesting research topic, here are 3 case studies related to norm change that I would love to read about, but don’t currently have time to research myself. If you are interested in picking up any of them, I’d love to discuss (and read the result). 1. The canonization of Oscar
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