Featured image for “Is the UK diverting Covid vaccines from poorer countries?”

Is the UK diverting Covid vaccines from poorer countries?

March 25, 2021
Guest post by Rory Horner (University of Manchester) and Ken Shadlen (LSE) Various UK media reports have blamed lower than expected supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India for a slowing of the UK’s vaccination programme, especially delaying immunisation of the under-50s. Although five million doses of vaccines produced by the Serum Institute of India were dispatched from India to
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What is COVID-19 telling us about leadership?

March 18, 2021
Guest post from Heather Marquette and Sian Herbert, both University of Birmingham. Their paper on ­­COVID-19, Governance and Conflict: Emerging Impacts and Future Evidence Needs, reviews hundreds of pieces of research and analysis and is published by the Knowledge for Development (K4D) COVID-19 Resource Hub. COVID-19 has so far proven to be a unique – and ongoing – global natural
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What can we learn from 200 case studies of ’emergent agency in a time of Covid’?

March 17, 2021
The ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid-19‘ research project is churning out some interesting findings and a flurry of webinars. Here Niranjan Nampoothiri and Filippo Artuso give some headline findings on the 200 case studies Niranjan has analysed and coded. We aim to publish the database later this year. Niranjan will present his findings on 6th April, 12.30 UTC
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What kinds of ‘Agency’ are emerging as grassroots organizations respond to Covid?

February 18, 2021
Six months in, the ‘Emerging Agency in a time of Covid’ project is coming along nicely, and starting to generate some interesting insights. We recently spent 90 minutes on a call with the ‘cluster convenors’ – people who have offered to host discussions with groups of people around the world on particular issues (faith organizations, social movements, women’s rights, peace-building
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After Covid, what next for the world’s kids?

February 16, 2021
Guest post by UNICEF’s Laurence Chandy One salvation of the COVID-19 pandemic is that children have been largely spared from severe infections. Yet the broader effects of the crisis on the young have already caused untold harm and are now poised to reset the forces that have driven progress for the world’s children since the start of this century.    Children,
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Imagining the world anew: the pandemic and gender equality

January 28, 2021
The pandemic has eroded women’s rights – but there is a way forward, says Nikki van der Gaag   2020 was not a good year for women’s rights. Women have borne the brunt of the effects of the pandemic, from home schooling to losing their jobs to domestic violence to a drop in girl’s education and a decrease in the
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Why the Inequality Virus should be the talk of Davos this week

January 26, 2021
Survey results
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Nothing to Learn from East Asia?

January 21, 2021
This post by Jomo Kwame Sundaram was first posted on the IPS website Covid-19 infection and death rates in the Western world and many developing countries in Asia and Latin America have long overtaken East Asia since the second quarter of 2020. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering prevailing Western accounts of the Asian financial crises, there have been no serious efforts to
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Can Financial Diaries help us understand life in fragile and conflict-affected settings?

January 13, 2021
Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of diaries as a research tool into issues such as governance and finance. Here Sandrine N’simire, Ishara Tchumisi and Patricia Stys, of LSE’s Centre for Public Authority in International Development, discuss their experiences conducting research using ‘financial diaries’ as part of LSE’s Water Governance project in Goma, DRC. This blog forms part of the Idjwi
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Has Covid been a tipping point for Universal Social Protection? Here’s what we know

January 7, 2021
Crises act as tipping points. Local crises and conflicts can galvanize a social movement or discredit a leader in a given location. Global crises change far more than that – the 2008 financial crisis has been credited with everything from sparking the rise of right-wing populism (hopefully now heading for a historical dustbin near you) to transforming norms around inequality
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Gender, Power and Progress: How Norms Change

December 16, 2020
A very good paper on a fascinating and important topic, by Caroline Harper, Rachel Marcus, Rachel George, Sophia M. D’Angelo, Emma Samman, published by ODI and ALIGN. The research questions are ambitious: how gender norms have changed over the past quarter-century, what has supported and blocked changes to gender norms in a number of sectors, and how to ensure change is faster, and robust
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Philanthropy: a History. Kevin Watkins reviews a big new book

December 9, 2020
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
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