Guest post from Kevin Watkins Have you ever wondered what links Bono and Bill Gates to Moses, Socrates, Basil the Great, a 4th Century AD bishop in Asia Minor, and the ‘gilded age’ industrialist Andrew Carnegie? Me neither. But Paul Vallely’s magisterial book Philanthropyprovides the answer. Tracing the ties that bind contemporary philanthropists to the Ancient world, the book raises

When you organize a series of lectures with the rather grandiose title ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’, it really helps if the speaker’s topic is in the news at the time of their talk. So given recent turmoil over the fate of UK aid, when Clare Short rocked up (metaphorically) last week to deliver a lecture entitled

Guest blog by Chris Roche, Josie Flint and Fiona Tarpey   As the COVID pandemic spread around the world a significant natural experiment took place in the Pacific. The vast majority of non-Pacific international aid workers, technical specialists and diplomats returned to their home countries. Preliminary findings of a real-time monitoring exercise of the effects on development and humanitarian organisations

Sam Nadel, Oxfam’s Head of Policy and Advocacy, reflects on a bad week for the UK. Cast your mind back to December 2016. Boris Johnson, then UK Foreign Secretary, is speaking at an event at Chatham House, laying out his vision for the UK’s role in the world. Just six months earlier, the UK had voted to leave the European Union.   In

Larissa Pelham, Oxfam’s Social Protection Adviser, reports back on a 4 day Zoomathon Covid-19 has catapulted social protection into the spotlight.  From furloughing to school feeding programmes delivered to homes, 212 states and territories across the world have planned or delivered 1179 social protection interventions in response to the pandemic.  It is the backbone support to families and individuals to

While we’re all chewing our nails about the US election, here’s recent LSE Masters student Hanna Toda with a post on how to keep learning while job-hunting. Job applications can be an anxious waiting game for many students who have just finished their degrees. It can also feel exciting and/or overwhelming at how much more there still is to learn

Thought I’d repost this book review from 2018 today. No particular reason…. A lot of the power of a successful book is in its ‘big idea’ – the overall frame that endures long after the detailed arguments have faded in the memory. On that basis, ‘How to Rig an Election’ looks set to do very well indeed. The authors are

I’ve been having similar conversations in several places over the last couple of weeks, which usually triggers a post. People send me a draft strategy document and say ‘what do you think?’ I take a deep breath and launch in. Half an hour later they look a bit shell-shocked, but (these are NGOs after all), always say what a useful

How to cope with Information Overload – how much of the daily tide of opinion and research on aid, development, politics etc can you manage to surf, while still doing the day job (which may well involve adding to it)? Some colleagues suffer from FOMO and ICYMI, hopping between social media in a constant scavenging for wisdom, or at least

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

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