I’m off to Papua New Guinea in a couple of weeks in the role of ‘critical friend’ (more on that weird job description in due course) to a big Aussie-funded aid program (the A$87m Building Community Engagement in PNG Program) run by DT Global (as Cardno is now called). They’ve just published an excellent guidance note on Adaptive Management, written

Spoke on a panel last week in UCL’s Policy and Practice lecture series. The topic was Nina Hall’s new book, Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (putting in the discount code ASFLYQ6 will get you 30% off, btw). Some thoughts. The book explores a new-ish generation of digital advocacy organizations with professional staff. MoveOn was the first, established in the

Last in the current snapshots of the GELI Influencing programme I’ve been leading this year. We’ve had blogs on all the other elements – the Face to Face meetings, the ‘user experience’, the podcasts with experts. Here’s a write up (Chatham House rule) of the missing piece – the online modules, in this case on analysis. 7 senior aid folk

You’ve probably seen the Just Stop Oil protesters throwing tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery this week – the video on Twitter has over 35 million views, and everyone is talking about it. In particular, a big debate about whether this is just vandalism or smart protest. Tom Aston reflects. In an interesting blog, James Ozden criticizes those talking heads in the UK

For our Global Executive Leadership Initiative training on influencing, I interviewed Wilf Mwamba, a long term FCDO/DFID practitioner-thinker on TWP, now working in the private sector. With GELI’s permission, I’m reposting here, along with an abbreviated transcript. The podcast is 25 minutes – well worth it, IMO. WM: I work for DAI Global, a US international consultancy firm. I’m leading a

Ha-Joon Chang on Economics v Science Fiction, and other great ways to end your weeks this autumn – the LSE’s Cutting Edge lectures are back Heads up for this year’s LSE ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’ lecture series, which kicks off next Friday (14th October). We’re moving into hybrid mode this year, with a mix of online

Two participants from our recent influencing training in Panama (Thomas Dunmore Rodriguez, National Influencing Adviser at Oxfam, and Alice Shackelford, UN Resident Coordinator in Honduras) discuss what they learned and the implications for more effective advocacy A couple of weeks ago the GELI course on Influencing for Senior Leaders brought representatives from the UN and several national and international NGOs

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

Since in-real-life contact resumed, I have been to some classically terrible academic seminars (which took me back to this 2016 cathartic rant). Here are my notes from one recent purgatorial experience: ‘Forgotten just how bad academic seminars can be (come back Covid, all is forgiven!): Not reading the room (full of people who know the context), so they spend most

Guest post from Shruti Patel Emily Oster, an economist, mother of two, and one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people, wants parenting to be treated like a profession. How? By getting them to make data-driven decisions about their kids. In her latest book, The Family Firm she translates decades of research on how key decisions (e.g., on after-school care

Ah the summer reading backlog. A hammock, sunshine (lots of it) and some good books. Top of my reviews list this year was Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose, by Stefan Dercon. He summarized his book on this blog back in May, but I wanted to read (and review) it for myself. Dercon is a big

Last but not least in this summer series of posts from my LSE activism class, Jonathan Swinney (full project on which this post is based here) When I think about elephants, my mind wanders off to Dumbo – a fictional elephant loved by millions around the world. In 1941, some people thought we would never see him again. But he