The ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid-19‘ research project is churning out some interesting findings and a flurry of webinars. Here Niranjan Nampoothiri and Filippo Artuso give some headline findings on the 200 case studies Niranjan has analysed and coded. We aim to publish the database later this year. Niranjan will present his findings on 6th April, 12.30 UTC

Guest blog by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, co-authors of The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed, which is published next week The debate over development, so vibrant in the 1960s and 1970s, is being reinvigorated around the world with the rise of self-proclaimed “water defenders.”  And, while largely off many people’s radar, that debate

Guest post by Wytske Chamberlain and Wegayehu Fitawek of Land Matrix Africa, hosted by the University of Pretoria  Remember the global riots over food set off by sharp spikes in commodity prices in 2008? The biofuel hype as THE solution to dirty oil? And the financial crisis that drove investors to look for alternative assets to invest their dollars, euros

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Legal activism can be slow and expensive, but boy can it be effective, especially when combined with mass campaigning. Kudos (chapeau?) to four French NGOs for winning this court ruling that could force their government to get serious on the climate crisis. This post by Armelle le Comte first appeared on Oxfam’s Views and Voices blog On February 3rd 2021 in

This post by my LSE colleague Tom Kirk is part of a series exploring ‘public authority’ based on research at LSE’s Centre for Public Authority and International Development at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa. It was first published on the Africa at LSE blog A ‘public authorities’ lens seeks to understand the full range of actors claiming power and governing people in the

Last year’s corona cartoon competition and accompanying post by Pablo Suarez got a lot of people clicking and thinking about the role of humour in communicating about social change. Here Pablo’s collaborator and ace New Yorker cartoonist Pat Byrnes reflects on the 80th anniversary of a historic cartoon and what it tells us about social change. Eighty years ago this month,

Happy International Women’s Day. From burden to benefit: Reframing the conversation on care. Smart piece by Amber Parkes on the power of language in advocacy. And beautifully written (just started using the intro in my blog training slides). V excited to see a Portuguese translation of How Change Happens, free to download.Here’s the video of the launch last week, if

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Guest post by Seb Rumsby As our world becomes increasingly globalised, there are now more and more chances for people from vastly unequal economic situations to meet and connect – be it through tourism, migration or social media. At the same time, we are witnessing a widespread disillusionment with so-called ‘experts’ and technocrats in the realms of politics and international

Generally, I seem to lead a bit of a charmed life on twitter. I know it’s supposed to be full of angry trolls, but my experience is much friendlier than that. I often tweet questions or appeals for advice, and sometimes people really come through. My latest exercise in canvassing the wisdom of crowds was asking for their top tips

Maria Faciolince and I have a paper out in a Development and Change special collection on Open Access in academic publishing (full disclosure: Maria did most of the work). One of the concerns about how OA is playing out is that many journals have responded by introducing ‘author processing charges’ (averaging around £2,000 per article). Instead of readers paying to