What are your favourite, well-documented examples of a) public campaigning and b) influencing developing country and donor governments? I’m asking because, as part of the LSE’s impending training programme for senior aid peeps, part of the ‘Global Executive Leadership Initiative’. I have to put together brief annotated ‘further reading/listening/watching’ lists on those two issues. I want more examples of donors

Guest post by Annabel Dulhunty, building on this 2018 post from Tom Wein The idea of human dignity frequently appears as a lofty overarching goal for development agencies and programs. Dignity is fundamental to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet practical ways of addressing and measuring the dignity of program participants are frequently overlooked. For example, the preamble to

Understandably, perhaps, progressive researchers often prefer to try to understand the lives, challenges and struggles of the poor. Who wants to spend their time talking to sleazy fatcats? But if you want to change things, it’s often necessary to understand the people in charge. So I was very happy when public philosopher and political scientist Roman Krznaric sent over the

Lot of videos this week – headphones on Ukraine first, natch: Development Impact of War in Ukraine: Initial projections @UNDP: ‘30% of population likely to require life-saving humanitarian assistance. In its current scale and direction, 18m people projected to become affected and more than 7m internally displaced.’ undp.org/publications/d… Arnold Schwarzenegger shows how comms is done, but will anyone in Russia

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Guest post by Jonathan Fox, introducing his new paper Accountability is often treated as a magic bullet, an all-purpose solution to a very wide range of problems—from corrupt politicians and the quality of public services to systemic injustice and impunity.  Yet accountability reforms struggle to deliver. Has the idea been stretched so far that the buzzword gets watered down into

Guest post by Ravi Kanbur, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez and Andy Sumner Global Inequality 101: Global inequality is the distribution of income across all people on the planet from the poorest to the richest. It can be measured with the ‘Gini’ which ranges from 1 (a totally unequal planet or one person gets everything) to 0 (a totally equal planet). Global inequality

Guest post by Pablo Suarez, who seems to be willing to try almost anything to get the climate crisis message across. And who can blame him? What? A fitness dance video about an IPCC report, in a humanitarian website? Here’s the story: A recent report, entitled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability , offers  rigorous and extremely  concerning scientific

Ukraine, obviously: The Russian Embassy in Lisbon. Two neighbouring houses are projecting the blue and yellow onto its facade. The ambassador is reportedly “apoplectic”. ht Roger Hutchison Russia’s long-term economic policy options: Expect sanctions to last for 50 years or so. ‘Russian long-term economic policy will have to follow 2 objectives: import substitution + a shift of economic activity away

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Not sure if this is normal behaviour, but holidays is when I tend to read the big heavy tomes – see previous posts on Piketty, War and Peace, or other random novels. Last month’s holiday saw me chow down on Linda Colley’s The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, a Big Book with the grandest of sweeps on warfare, constitutions

Guest post from Anna Landre, one of my amazing students, who has bunked off class (with permission) to do some amazing work on Ukraine. And she’s pretty angry about what she’s seen. As a 23-year-old wheelchair user halfway through a Master’s degree at the London School of Economics, I didn’t expect to spend my past week working 16 hours a