A quick plug. Now the summer is gone, and the students have sobered up from freshers’ week (or whatever it’s called in the US), I’m taking the From Poverty to Powerpoint to the US. The tour is from 10-21 November and includes the following venues:

One of the unfinished tasks in From Poverty to Power is developing a better model for analysing processes of change, so I’ve been going back to my prehistoric roots as a physics undergraduate, and reading about complexity and chaos. Exploring the Science of Complexity is a newish (February 08) paper from the Overseas Development Institute […]

The December issue of my favourite current affairs magazine, Prospect, has some great analysis (laced with whimsy) of the election and transition. Top billing goes to an insightful assessment of Obama’s likely direction by Michael Lind. Lind cautions against euphoria, drawing on the already over-used comparison with FDR in predicting that Obama’s first term will mostly have […]

Professor Tim Lang, who invented the term ‘food miles’, is a gifted campaigner – it’s memorable, immediate and challenges consumers to take action to curb the environmental destruction caused by daft practices like shipping bottled water to markets on the other side of the world. But what if you’re one of the 1.5 million African […]

Just got back exhausted from an intense two week tour of the US organized by the hyper-efficient Kristen Prince at Oxfam America. Highlights included an afternoon on Capitol Hill in West Wing Wonderland discussing the book with Congressional staffers, big and enthusiastic turnouts at the Gates Foundation, Northeastern, Georgetown and Brandeis Universities and the World […]

A belated plug for a couple of top notch recent Oxfam policy papers. My colleague Kate Raworth has written an important paper on the relationship between human rights and climate change. By exploring the impact of climate change on a number of rights within international law (eg to food, life and security, subsistence and health), […]

My thanks to colleague Tom Noel for sending over a handy summary of the World Health Organization’s latest overview. 30 years after the Alma Ata declaration on Primary Health Care, the WHO is reaffirming the importance of PHC in guaranteeing universal access, social protection and health systems designed around people’s needs and participation.

Last week the South Korean multinational Daewoo announced it had secured a 99-year lease (i.e. more or less bought) for 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of Madagascar’s land, mostly in the Indian Ocean island’s arid west. Daewoo aims to grow 5m tonnes of corn (maize) a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from […]

UNCTAD’s 2008 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) Report, was published last week. Given 7% average annual growth rates in the 50 LDCs over the last 3 years, the report is surprisingly downbeat, arguing that even these levels of growth are failing to make a dent on poverty (as of 2005, 36% of the LDC population lived […]

That was a long day. Oxfam launched the book on Monday, so I head off for BBC radio’s Today programme at 6.15 in the morning, and finish with Al Jazeera TV news at past 10pm. The interviews are interspersed with interminable debates with the London media’s wonderfully globalized (and opinionated) cab drivers: the BBC guy […]

Following our recent conversation (see July 4 post), I’ve been digging into the views of Justin Lin, the World Bank’s first ever developing country chief economist. Check out his Marshall lecture on development, delivered in Cambridge in November 2007, shortly before he got his new job. It gives a fascinating insight into how Lin’s interpretation […]

From Poverty to Power argues that effective states and active citizens between them hold the key to unlocking development, but are states just too big and remote for NGOs to influence? I had some fascinating discussions on this at a workshop in Viet Nam a couple of weeks ago.