Confession time, with a dash of heresy. I have mixed feelings (and a fair amount of confusion) about the whole ‘rights based approach’ to development. First, it has a lot going for it. The human rights framework is: precise: it sets out clearly who has obligations and duties and who has not, and what those obligations and duties are. practical:

Amartya Sen has an important piece out in the New Republic magazine, on the links between environment and development. It’s quite long, so I thought I’d offer my precis service. He argues that the attention to climate change is disproportionate, not because we should think less about it, but because we should worry a lot more about other environmental issues,

Ah yes, death by consultation, the fate that awaits all NGO policy wonks. The international civil society alliance CIVICUS has published ‘Beyond Our Two Minutes’, a useful new report trying to assess the efforts of intergovernmental organizations (UN, World Bank etc) to engage with civil society. It’s a pilot project, developing a scorecard to test IGO engagement and produce a

Hugh Cole, who supports Oxfam’s country teams in influencing at national level, wonders if we’ve missed a trick by focusing too much on nation states Given the growing size, number and importance of big cities and their often unique politics, should Oxfam be doing more to work with/on progressive cities to make progress on big global challenges where the global

Some more innovative work from the London School of Economics. This genuinely thought-provoking 8 minute video describes a collaboration between the LSE-hosted International Growth Centre and Zambia’s Ministry of Health. The background academic paper is here. Researchers and officials worked together to answer an important question:  to motivate people in rural villages to become rural community health workers (CHWs), is

If you are interested in Theories of Change (ToCs), you have to read Craig Valters’ new paper ‘Theories of Change in International Development: Communication, Learning or Accountability’ or at least, his accompanying blog. The paper draws on the fascinating collaboration between the LSE and The Asia Foundation, in which TAF gave LSE researchers access to its country programmes and asked

Last week I headed off to the Kennington Tandoori for one of those enjoyable food-fuelled brainstorms that seem to happen during the summer lull. This one was with two disability campaigners – Mosharraf Hossain and Tim Wainwright of ADD International. ADD is doing some brilliant work supporting the emergence of Disabled People’s Organizations in Africa and Asia. ADD is at

It can be a little disorienting when you stray from your intellectual silo, and read stuff from other disciplines. Sometimes it is entirely unintelligible, but it gets more interesting  when it resembles debates in development land, but with slightly different language (or the same words mean slightly different things) and reference points, like Darwin’s finches diverging on their different Galapagos

This guest post comes from Oxfam well-being guru Katherine Trebeck Over the last few years there has been a spate of measurement initiatives – way too many to list here. Together they represent a positive, if disparate, effort to improve the measures that we take into account when assessing the success of something – a policy, a programme, or even

As I begin work on the book on How Change Happens (no I haven’t written it yet, please stop asking), I’m collecting good analyses of social/political change processes. So thanks Bert Maerten for sending a fascinating account of the same-sex marriage movement in the US, by Paul and Mark Englers. The speed of the change is breathtaking: As of 1990,

It’s World Humanitarian Day today, and I want to talk about money, but not the perennial topic of quantity of aid for emergency relief.  Let’s talk about quality. On my visit to the DRC in May, I was pretty shocked by the conversations I had with humanitarian colleagues about how they fund their work. The ‘crisis’ has been going on

Yesterday’s post covered some new work on the MDGs’ limitations, so in the interests of balance (ahem) today Alice Evans from the LSE discusses her slightly more positive findings from Zambia. I would love to hear about other comparable research in other countries. Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to fill in the evidential vacuum on whether/how the