Guest post by Jeff Hallock and Naomi Hossain While the world was watching the war in Ukraine, its side-effects via rising food and energy prices were also playing out in the form of mass protests about the cost-of-living crisis in 148 countries. This global wave, unprecedented in world history, tells us that not only is the global economy in bad

The Action for Empowerment and Accountability research consortium, led by IDS and with quite a lot of involvement from Oxfam (including me) is now winding up with the customary emission of academic papers (think puffballs reaching maturity). One of these is a whole issue of Development Policy Review (now Open Access – yay!) on ‘Citizen Action for Accountability in Challenging

My last trip pre-Covid was to the DRC, to look at a water project in Goma, and the resulting research paper (co-authored with Patrycja Stys, Tom Kirk and Tom Mosquera) has just been published (yep, just three and a half years later). It charts an attempt by MercyCorps to drive change in a water sector that has massively failed citizens in the

Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict, by Mareike Schomerus, (Open Access here) is one of the wisest books I’ve read in a long time. To write it, she became a modern day hermit (‘solitude, storms and music’), retreating to the Shetland Islands to reflect on and synthesize the lessons of a monster 10 year ODI research

Particularly liked the series of rather splendid blogs for International Women’s Day, written by our amazing LSE students. Here’s my favourite, not least because of the lovely blogging style: Does digitalised social protection worsen exclusion for women? by Divija Samria Here’s the deal: digitisation of delivery mechanisms in public programs is increasingly being used to improve targeted approaches, reduce out-of-system

Loved this piece from Hugo Slim, first posted on the Humanitarian Law and Policy blog. Influence is typically conceived as a subtle form of power that is indirect, unconscious, or deliberately hidden. Influencers are often off-stage rather than on it, whispering behind a curtain, appearing in dreams, or using magic of some kind. Influence tends to work gradually, seeping gently

What is the point of all the noise on human rights violations, all that ‘speaking truth to power’ to repressive regimes who don’t listen, if no-one is ever brought to justice? When all those lawyers, Amnesty reports, email campaigns and UN treaties simply bounce off the brute realities of national power? Kate Cronin-Furman’s intriguing new book uses a political economy

Guest Post from Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford ‘Once again, humanitarians are bogged down in a moral predicament in Afghanistan. The extreme misogyny of Taliban policy is back and international humanitarian agencies should refuse to cooperate with it. The Taliban’s initial tolerance of gender equality in

Powerful piece in the Economist earlier this month stressing a link that is sometimes lost in the coverage of hunger crises – the link to ‘men with guns’ as they put it. Some excerpts: ‘At first glance, Vladimir Putin has little in common with an Ethiopian foot-soldier. One man has palaces and nuclear weapons, the other a shack and an

I recently interviewed William Chemaly, coordinator of the Global Protection Cluster Here’s a transcript of the highlights DG: Hi William, you have one of those terribly important sounding jobs that no one outside the humanitarian sector understands. Maybe you could explain who you are and what you do to begin with? WC: Thanks Duncan. Protection is the heart and soul

Well that was intense. We’ve just come to the end of a one year programme to design and deliver a training course on ‘influencing’ to senior aid leaders (UN, INGOs, Red Cross/Crescent and National NGOs). 6 months to design the materials and methodology; the rest to deliver the training to 6 cohorts of 25 people in 5 locations around the

Oxfam’s Amy Croome reports back on a very different kind of localization discussion What happens when you bring together local activists and organisations to discuss how to reform the humanitarian system? I recently found out, attending a conference, where more than 85% of the speakers and moderators were from national and local organisations (compared to not even 10% at the