Six months in, the ‘Emerging Agency in a time of Covid’ project is coming along nicely, and starting to generate some interesting insights. We recently spent 90 minutes on a call with the ‘cluster convenors’ – people who have offered to host discussions with groups of people around the world on particular issues (faith organizations, […]

Spent an enjoyable couple of hours last week chatting to some students doing the LSE MSc in Cities course about their group projects. These were aimed at designing initiatives to promote different aspects of sustainability and emissions reductions in major cities: Montreal (building regulations);  Bogotá (transport); Freetown (natural habitat) and Amsterdam (consumption). We covered some […]

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 […]

zoom room v real room. ht Graham Teskey ‘Science Fictions’. The comic strip guide to academic success. Brilliant. Ht Ranil Dissanayake Aftershocks: How is Covid Affecting Africa? New weekly newsletter from the ONE Campaign. Sign up here Three Key Shifts on Development Cooperation in China’s 2021 White Paper. Excellent overview of China’s evolving aid policy […]

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 […]

In the run up to digital Davos this year, I got into a conversation with Jenny Ricks of the Fight Inequality Alliance about the huge growth in campaigning on inequality. On the one hand, inequality is clearly an important and pressing issue (I won’t rehearse the arguments here). But it’s also really multi-faceted – wealth, […]

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 […]

I talk a lot about the power of league tables, and got a dose of my own medicine last week when this circulated on twitter. Initial reaction, overjoyed – now Oxfam really won’t be able to sack me. Probably. Then I took a closer look. It’s an analysis of who the top 150 top people […]

Guest post by Mitchell Watkins & Professor Mushtaq Khan (SOAS University of London) Our research in Bangladesh identifies two practical ways to make climate change adaptation funding more effective. First, anti-corruption monitoring is more effective when led by locally influential households; secondly and more importantly, their involvement can be increased by designing adaptation projects to […]

My LSE Masters module on Advocacy, Campaigning and Grassroots Activism kicked off recently with a great discussion on the nature of power. Tom Kirk, who teaches the course with me, asked each of the seminar groups to buzz on ‘how has your disciplinary background shaped your understanding of power’. Some fascinating patterns emerged. If you […]