Richard English, Oxfam’s in-house wizard on all things to do with campaigning, on its new Influencing for Impact Guide. Do please listen to the full 25m conversation if you can, but here are some extracts. Duncan: In your 25 years campaigning at Oxfam, what have been the high points? Examples where Oxfam really got it right? Richard: One or two

RIP RBG ht Kate Raworth Global perceptions of land and property rights. More detail on the 1bn ppl who live in fear of losing their homes, inc breakdown by geography, urban v rural, young v old and gender Latest round of Oxfam’s ‘Make Change Happen’ MOOC for activists starts today (5th October). Register now to join thousands of happy grads!

Apologies if this is too much, but my home internet went down at the crucial moment last week, so now I’m in catch up mode….. First week of 21st September Then week of 28th September

Organizing (along with James Putzel) the LSE’s guest lecture series on ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’ has turned out to be one of the few genuine silver linings in the Covid cloud. Because we’ve had to move to fully online, we’ve been able to get some of the world’s most interesting thinkers to speak to us from

Spent a fun couple of hours last week helping the Centre for Good Governance (CGG) in Myanmar identify its ‘rules of thumb’ (RoTs) – the default questions and instincts that govern an organization’s daily decision-making, rather than the long-winded strategy documents that no-one reads. One of the national staff nailed the difference ‘The theory of change comes later than the

Kate Raworth launches a brilliant, potentially world-shaping, new initiative This week is the online launch of Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL). At the heart of it is a community platform, open to everyone who wants to turn Doughnut Economics from a radical idea into transformative action. We’ll be co-creating tools and sharing stories of how to build regenerative and distributive

If you’re interested in Thinking and Working Politically, or the use of Political Economy Analysis (PEA) in aid and development, then do please follow the Governance and Development Soapbox, run by the team at Abt. I’ve re-posted quite a few of its blogposts, by Graham Teskey, Lavinia Tyrrel and others, but it also has some excellent working papers and briefing

Guest post by Muyatwa Sitali, Head of Country Engagement, Sanitation and Water for All COVID-19 has taught us that a world where nearly half of its population do not have what they need to properly wash their hands at critical times is not a safe world. We are delicately and dangerously connected. A disease which started in one city has

Sincerest form of flattery and all that. Inspired by Alice Evans’ bookification of her course reading list, Tom Kirk and I have turned the reading list for our LSE course on advocacy, campaigning and grassroots activism into a course manual, adding more background, a summary of each week’s content and seminar questions, among other things. Here it is – all

Last up in this short series of ’emergent agency’ case studies from the Interface Journal. María Jose Ventura Alfaro describes how independent feminist collectives in Mexico have created solidarity networks across the country to tackle the gravest socioeconomic consequences of the virus at the local level: shortages of food, medicine, and other essential products and an upsurge in domestic and

Hongwei Bao argues that rather than seeing the pandemic as an obstacle to social movements, it can be a good opportunity to experiment with flexible and creative modes of social and political activism. This piece is a shortened version of a paper in the Interface Journal. From January to April, many Chinese cities including Wuhan were locked down in a

We’ve had an amazing response to our launch of the project on ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid‘, and are now processing all the contacts and info we’ve received. For those wanting examples of the kinds of experiences we are interested in, I’ll be posting some examples over the next few days. First up, Sobhi Mohanty argues that the