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Guest post by Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Multiple studies of the effects of the pandemic on civil society, including a major IDS report released last week, paint a discouraging picture. Civil society has come under assault from many directions at once, including executive overreach, securitisation of public life, the constriction of online freedoms, sharpened social divisions, and

Civicus publishes its annual ‘State of Civil Society Report’ today. It’s great, with a v cool website and the report is beautifully written too (thanks for that – I have to read a lot of plodding devspeak, so it makes a real difference!). I recommend the overview if you’re looking for a succinct, accessible summary on the state of civic

What is going on with the cuts to the UK’s aid budget? Judging from first impressions, the axe is being arbitrarily taken to a lot of really good aid programmes, with no overall plan or rationale. Surely that must be wrong – this is a £10 billion budget we’re talking about, even after the cuts. Any manager knows that budgets

Snouts in the pharma trough. Covid has created 9 new pharma billionaires, yet we’re failing to vaccinate billions of people. Covid vaccines, funded by public cash, should be first and foremost a global public good. Oxfam. Relative support of left and right leaning parties by education and income in the 1970s and 2010s. Short version – in the 1970s richer/more

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Got a very exciting email yesterday (yes, it does happen). One of the most-read posts on this blog over the years has been the table ‘What Brits say v What they mean’, which I first published in 2011. A colleague had pinged it over, and I was frustratingly unable to locate the original source. I decided to publish anyway because

Next up in my series of interviews on the real-world influence of researchers at the LSE Centre for Public Authority and International Development, I explore the impact of Claire Elder’s work on Somalia, which raises a whole host of issues around how research can influence policy and practice: How the act of researching for a PhD can itself lay the groundwork

Some really important number crunching in The Economist this week. They have built an estimate of the number of ‘excess deaths’ worldwide – that is mortality above the pre-Covid average. This gives you a more accurate picture of how many people have died, because so many Covid deaths are not recorded as pandemic-related (whether because of weak stats systems, or

First a small announcement. I’m trying to dig into the impact of UK aid cuts. I’d love to talk to insiders re how partner govts are reacting; any suggestions of a strategy behind what look like random cuts. In confidence if you’d prefer. You know what to do. Argentina is leading the world with its gender-responsive Covid policies. Great article

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One of my LSE activism students asked if she could highlight the horrible response to popular protests currently going on in her native Colombia. Guest post by Daniela Duran  and Lorenzo Uribe   Colombia is entering its third week of protests and, although a lot of what is happening is new to the country, the political response to it has