August 20, 2024
Ducked out of my annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe recently (highly recommended, as ever – highlight was being invited up on stage and asked to impersonate a Norwegian comedian’s cervix. Not something I’ll forget in a hurry….) to spend an hour or two with the Scottish Government development team. Really interesting. In some ways, the SG is prototyping post-$
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RIP Pablo Suarez – a Unique Voice on Humanitarianism and Climate Change
July 17, 2024
Terrible news came through this week – the sudden, unexpected and horribly premature death of my friend and colleague, Pablo Suarez. Pablo was a maverick, Boston-based Argentine who broke boundaries and charted new paths in communicating some of the most pressing challenges of our age. Can’t believe he’s gone, and judging by the outpouring of grief and memories on social
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Six big humanitarian policy trends for 2024
January 4, 2024
Irwin Loy and Will Worley have an excellent 2024 curtain raiser on The New Humanitarian, which is now by some distance my favourite aid blog. It’s a bit long by FP2P standards, so I’ve cut it down a bit: Money: Learning to do less with less In 2023, humanitarians took a look in the mirror and admitted what everyone already knew: They don’t have
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Mia Mottley on Slavery, Poverty, George Floyd, Climate and the Future of the World
December 14, 2023
I was lucky enough to attend the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley’s extraordinary speech at LSE last week (Video here or audio file here). Props to outgoing Oxfam CEO Danny Sriskandarajah and whoever else from Oxfam was involved in pulling it together, along with the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, who hosted. It was jaw-dropping for both the performance, interweaving
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Feminist Climate Justice – what is it and how could it help?
December 11, 2023
Guest post from Laura Turquet, Silke Staab and Constanza Tabbush, all of UN Women By the time you read this, you may know the final result of COP 28 in Dubai, but as of Monday, it doesn’t look very hopeful. Could feminist thinking unlock some of the logjams that continue to frustrate action on the scale and speed that we
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RIP Saleemul Huq, a true climate hero
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 ‘Knowledge’ on Climate Change?
August 31, 2023
Thanks to Irene Guijt for sending over her 2021 chapter (gated, sorry – boooh!) on ‘The urgency for epistemic and political climate justice’, co-authored with Jacobo Ocharan and Velina Petrova for an edited volume, Knowledge for the Anthropocene. Don’t worry about the slightly intimidating title (confession: I always find ‘epistemic’ sending me scuttling back to the dictionary, along with ‘ontological’,
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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 “Beyond GDP” 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
I’m spending the summer lull updating How Change Happens and am coming across some really interesting stuff. To update the book’s case study on the Paris Climate Summit of 2015, Irene Guijt sent over ‘A short history of the successes and failures of the international climate change negotiations’ 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 Oxfam’s ‘chief opinionator’ – 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 ‘Effectiveness Reviews’ – 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 ‘Supporting policy towards sustainability’. It’s 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 ‘slightly ethical’ (his words) as he kicks off what I’m sure will be a stream of interesting outputs from his new ‘What is Climate Humanitarianism?’ 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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