Some wonks from the ‘thinking and working politically’ (TWP) network discussed its influencing strategy last week. There were some people with proper jobs there, who demanded Chatham House Rules, which happily means I don’t have to remember who said what (or credit anyone). The discussion was interesting because it covered ground relevant to almost anyone trying to shift an internal

In the development business, DFID is a research juggernaut (180 dedicated staff, £345m annual budget, according to the ad for a new boss for its Research and Evidence Division). So it’s good news that they are consulting researchers, NGOs etc tomorrow on their next round of funding for research on empowerment and accountability (E&A). Unfortunately, I can’t make it, but

Forget mixed panels, how often do you see this at a conference? (although a crèche might have made her life easier…..) [h/t Rahma M Mian] Wonder what Dominique Strauss-Kahn would make of the IMF’s new report on national restrictions on women’s rights ‘Number of wrecked airplanes near the runway of the main airport’. Crowd-sourced “Real World Development Indicators” from Chris Blattman

One of the many positives about development is that lots of good stuff is happening much earlier in a country’s trajectory – on average, falling infant mortality, access to healthcare and education, rights, democracy etc all take place at lower levels of GDP per capita than in the past. Unfortunately, guru economist Dani Rodrik has also found something not so

My colleague Max Lawson (@maxlawsontin ), Oxfam’s head of global policy and campaigns, lost a friend to illness recently, and wrote this fine, angry polemic in response (it appeared earlier this week in Huffpo): My friend died last week. Mr Kumambala was a great man, who had taught mathematics to Malawi’s children for more than forty years. His huge smile and

I’m still catching up on the email backlog after returning from holiday, but while I’m doing so, here’s something I should probably do more of – a straight lift from a really interesting article. I recently signed up to the New York Times ‘Fixes’ column (‘solutions to social problems and why they work’). On a bad week, it can be

Katherine Trebeck (@ktrebeck), Oxfam policy adviser and all round well-being guru, reports on a new effort to apply doughnut economics at a national scale, starting with the UK   Every so often, a simple idea catches people’s imagination. Complex concepts get distilled into a mantra or image that elicits an ‘a ha’ moment. World views can be changed. Perspectives shifted.

Livestock demography: where do the world’s 1.4 billion cows, 19.6 billion chickens & 0.98 billion pigs live? Here’s the cows Tolkien’s ‘one ring to rule them all’ as a parable for the attractions and perils of new technologies UK aid watchdog criticises DFID for its efforts to expand work in fragile states, but accepts real impact will ‘take a generation’

Spent a fun day at the Developmental Leadership Program annual conference in Birmingham yesterday. I was on a panel pitching an idea for a research programme that has got me very excited (along with David Hudson and Niheer Dasandi from University College London). Here’s my pitch. One of my formative influences as a policy wonk was watching the impact of

I’ve been thinking about how we criticize/critique people, groups and ideas recently. It started with a conversation with my pal Chris Roche who first expressed surprise at the snarky tone of my post on a paper on NGOs (What can we learn from a really annoying paper on NGOs and development?) and then pronounced himself a bit irritated by some

No-one does long term campaigning better than faith groups – the Quakers led the anti-slavery struggle for 50 years in the early 1800s. As for the Catholics, when your institution is a couple of thousand years old, you tend to take the long view. I thought of this last week, as I cycled past ‘Romero Close’ – site of the

I’ve been having fun recently taking some of the ideas around ‘Doing Development Differently’ and applying them to INGOs, building on the post I wrote last year on ‘You can’t take a supertanker white-water rafting’. The Exam Question is: Given complexity, systems thinking and the failure of top down approaches, what future, if any, is there for International NGOs? Paper