
October 30, 2023
Over the weekend, the horrible news came through of the death at 71 of Saleemul Huq, a scientist and activist who attended every single global negotiation on climate change since 1992. Saleem was a lovely man, a remorseless but invariably polite campaigner for climate action, both as Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh
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Who Decides What Constitutes âKnowledgeâ on Climate Change?
August 31, 2023
Thanks to Irene Guijt for sending over her 2021 chapter (gated, sorry â boooh!) on âThe urgency for epistemic and political climate justiceâ, co-authored with Jacobo Ocharan and Velina Petrova for an edited volume, Knowledge for the Anthropocene. Donât worry about the slightly intimidating title (confession: I always find âepistemicâ sending me scuttling back to the dictionary, along with âontologicalâ,
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The Gross Domestic Problem: what would a new economic measure that values women and climate look like?
August 3, 2023
Measuring progress by Gross Domestic Product leads straight to gender injustice, austerity and environmental ruin. Anam Parvez Butt and Alex Bush introduce a new Oxfam discussion paper that aims to encourage debate about alternative metrics, and calls on advocates to join the âBeyond GDPâ movement Since its official adoption at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, Gross Domestic Product or
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How did we get here? Great chronology of citizen and corporate action on climate
August 1, 2023
Iâm spending the summer lull updating How Change Happens and am coming across some really interesting stuff. To update the bookâs case study on the Paris Climate Summit of 2015, Irene Guijt sent over âA short history of the successes and failures of the international climate change negotiationsâ an excellent (open access) paper by Mark Maslin, John Lang and Fiona
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Evaluating the Evaluations: What lessons can Oxfam draw from a Decade of Scrutiny?
July 27, 2023
Propaganda and opinion are easy; establishing the truth is hard (and I speak here as someone once branded Oxfamâs âchief opinionatorâ – thanks John Magrath). Oxfam has been wrestling with different ways to evaluate impact for decades and in a new paper, a team led by Katrina Barnes ploughed through 67 âEffectiveness Reviewsâ â rigorous impact evaluations on randomly selected
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How Can Researchers Support the Policy Shift to Sustainability?
July 19, 2023
My favourite chapter in How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research (in addition to the one on Critical Friends which goes up tomorrow) was by Alice Owen, a prof at Leeds university, on âSupporting policy towards sustainabilityâ. Itâs a lovely reflection from a senior academic on the lessons she has learned in engaging with policy makers over the years.
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Is it right to prioritise fragile states in the climate crisis?
June 7, 2023
Hugo Slim gets âslightly ethicalâ (his words) as he kicks off what Iâm sure will be a stream of interesting outputs from his new âWhat is Climate Humanitarianism?â project at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. Initially published on the Humanitarian Practice Network blog In the run-up to COP 28, humanitarian agencies are
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Reforming the World Bank: some good ideas, but where’s the power, politics and feasibility?
May 31, 2023
Spent a half day at ODI recently discussing the reform of the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) â the global ones like World Bank, the regional ones like the Asia or African Development Bank, and the new ones like the BRICs Bank. It was interesting for what was said, but also for what was missing. First what was said: On World
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Can humanitarian experience guide the development of new loss and damage funding?
May 24, 2023
After years of political wrangling, we are finally seeing some progress in terms of wealthy nations shouldering some (small part) of the burden of Loss & Damage â but how do we make sure we donât repeat the mistakes of the past? Debbie Hillier of Mercy Corps and Paul Knox Clarke of Adapt Initiatives explore in a new paper how
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What can Oxfam’s new Davos Report teach us about Killer Graphics?
January 19, 2023
Ever since Matt Griffiths and I came up with the âcowfactâ in the early 2000s, Iâve been struck by the power of âkiller factsâ in NGO communications (heck, even Fidel Castro used Oxfam ones). But things have moved on, and now we live in a more visual, tweetable age of âkiller graphicsâ. So if killer facts reveal an injustice through
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Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies: the politics of saving the planet
January 17, 2023
Neil McCulloch introduces his new book Hands up if you would like petrol prices to go up? Iâm guessing not too many hands. The cripplingly high costs of energy (whether petrol, diesel, gas or coal as well as electricity) have posed a huge challenge for households and firms all around the world. Massive increases in these costs, driven by the
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Is Extinction Rebellion really quitting? Analysis of their New Year’s Day statement
January 4, 2023
As well as the headlines, First Edition, the Guardianâs excellent daily news summary (free subscription here), includes an in-depth conversation between the editor and one of its specialist journalists. Yesterdayâs, with environment correspondent Damien Gayle, was on âExtinction Rebellionâs New Yearâs Day statement, which led with the headline-grabbing phrase âwe quitââ. Not true, apparently. Hereâs the Guardianâs analysis: âThis is
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