Last week I went along to the launch of  People Power Under Attack 2019, the latest output of the Civicus Monitor project on the state of civil society organizations around the world. Afterwards, I picked the brains of two of the speakers, Dom Perera of Civicus, and Tonu Basu of Open Government Partnership. Here are a few of their insights

What, if anything, should academics, NGOs and funding institutions wanting to support researchers in fragile and conflict-affected states (FCAS) do differently compared to their work in more stable contexts? Been thinking and talking to people quite a lot about that recently, and based on those conversations and some great #PowerShifts posts, here are some thoughts: What do we mean by

Dear Reader, Please take the new FP2P reader survey – we really need your feedback to get new ideas and keep on improving! 2 minutes max (honest). Guest post from Exfamer Nicholas Colloff, who now runs Argidius, a private family foundation that supports intermediaries that help businesses grow and create quality employment in low income communities. A diversified, resilient economy

Given that we spend nothing on advertising on this blog, we reckon the traffic for a given post is a reasonable proxy for quality, so here are the top 5 posts from the last two months, courtesy of you (and Google Analytics). In descending order. The Randomistas just won the Nobel Economics prize. Here’s why RCTs aren’t a magic bullet.

Love the idea (and the title) of this report from MITGOV LAB. As someone who attempts to straddle academia and practitioners, I can vouch that such conversations are often marked by mutual incomprehension, sometimes laced with suspicion and/or contempt – not a good basis for a useful exchange. The authors, Varja Lipovsek and Alisa Zomer are also ‘boundary spanners’ –

Thanks Paul Knox-Clarke for sending me ‘Strategy as Simple Rules’, a 2001 Harvard Business Review article that helps clarify some fairly fuzzy stuff I’ve been writing here and elsewhere on ‘strategic rules of thumb’. The basic idea is that when strategizing, large organizations spend too much time discussing the ‘what’ (climate change? Gender? Education? Livelihoods?), and too little on the

Please read the synthesis report for the Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme – it’s written by John Gaventa and Katy Oswald, and is a model for how to communicate a large body of research in an accessible and practitioner-friendly way. (Full disclosure, I’ve contributed four papers to A4EA as part of my Oxfam role, but had nothing

I think I have finally identified the culprit for the dismal state of many academic conferences and most NGO meetings – the CIA Sabotage Field Manual (1941). Example: ‘Make “speeches”. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.’ ht Shit Academics Say. Rukmini Banerjee of Pratham describes its 20-year partnership with economics Nobelists Esther Duflo and & Abhijit Banerjee

By Dorothea Hilhorst and Isabelle Desportes of the Institute of Strategic Studies. The Netherlands has recently joined a handful of other Western countries in passing new laws with the hope of stifling terrorist activity and threats. The new legislation on counter-terrorism recently passed by the Dutch Parliament (Tweede Kamer) will be discussed in the Senate (Eerste Kamer) today. Thea Hilhorst

Civicus, the international network of civil society organizations, has some really interesting work on how donors and INGOs can get their act together in supporting the grassroots. Take your pick from the short summary, the full report (by Jennie Richmond, Matt Jackson & Bethany Eckley of impact works) or a short op-ed. Or just read these excerpts: The problem: A

In a new Carnegie Endowment paper, “Defending Civic Space: Is The International Community Stuck?”, Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers take stock of and argue for bolstering transnational efforts to push back against the global trend of closing space for civil society. During the past five years, the international aid community has woken up to the disturbing global trend of governments

I recently caught up with Prachi Srivastava, of the University of Western Ontario, who’s my go-to person on the heated development debates on public v private schools. Private v Public: I started working on this topic 18 years ago as a doctoral student. We were just entering the MDG and Education for All (EFA) era and at that time, rightfully