In mid 2008, long before the Copenhagen climate summit tanked or the University of East Anglia became synonymous with dodgy emails, Mike Hulme, a UEA geographer and climate modeller, and founder of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, went into deep reflection on the divisive nature of the climate change debate. The resulting book is fascinating, intriguing and at

When discussing social change (or anything else), there’s no substitute for good case studies. They inspire and provoke new thinking, helping us move beyond platitudes and generalizations, and they stick in the mind as islands of reality in a sea of social science blah. ‘Citizen action and national policy: making change happen’ a new book edited by John Gaventa and

  From deep inside the boilerhouse of the Robin Hood Tax campaign, this helpful update comes from Max Lawson, Oxfam’s man in the green mask….. The weeks up to the G20 Finance Ministers meeting in Washington DC on 23 April (on the margins of the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings) and the UK election (almost certainly on 6 May)

Expect a lot of soul searching around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) this year, in the run up to the UN high level event in September (see previous posts here and here). A recent issue of the IDS bulletin covered ‘The MDGs and Beyond’. The piece that caught my eye was an analysis of national Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) by

Fascinating talk with an academic insider in the Vietnamese establishment, who set out some thoughts on how big changes happen in Vietnam (eg the introduction of the Doi Moi process of economic opening or the land reform of the early 1990s). Particularly important because Vietnam’s record on growth with equity, and poverty reduction, is second to none. He saw certain

‘Lifting the Resource Curse’, a new Oxfam paper, revisits the difficult question of how to ensure natural resources are a blessing, and not a curse, for poor countries. Countries like Angola, where oil revenues (which represent 80 per cent of national income) are estimated at $10bn per year, yet 70 per cent of the population live on less than $2

Owen Barder has a thought-provoking post setting out his objections to a financial transactions tax (FTT) in response to the launch of the Robin Hood Tax campaign. I’ll run through the areas where we disagree, then where we agree, and finally the areas where I am still sitting painfully on the fence. Where we disagree: First the framing: Owen claims

I’ve blogged a few times on the momentum building behind the introduction of a Financial Transactions Tax (see here). Today it steps up a gear with the launch of international campaign calling for a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ (much more memorable!), with the full campaign repertoire – op-eds, a letter signed by 350+ economists, a dedicated website with lots of background materials, and

I’ve been mulling over the extraordinary shift in public mood since the Copenhagen summit. The devastating combination of a failed summit, the Democrats’ loss of the supermajority in the Senate and a string of climategates surrounding the University of East Anglia and IPCC risk a mood-swing in public sentiment from a ‘now is the time’ historic moment to ‘we’re all

Along with several other international NGOs working in Afghanistan, Oxfam last week published a powerful paper on the damage being caused by the militarization of aid. In many ways it resembles the debate on how to ensure that Haitian reconstruction builds, rather than undermines, its battered state. In the last half hour, one Afghan woman died from pregnancy-related complications, another

Together with Martin Walsh, our team’s research methods adviser, I’ve been browsing through some of the literature on how to ensure our work has impact…… After a year in which Britain’s top drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, was sacked by the Home Secretary (interior minister) for overstepping the line between providing advice and advocating specific changes to policy, you’d be

Networks are (yet) another development buzzword, contrasting with markets and hierarchies. They are proliferating in the international arena, as well as in academic literature – how many ‘Gs’ can you name apart from the G20 and the G8? What’s the difference? According to ‘Networks of Influence? Developing countries in a Networked Global Order‘, edited by Leonardo Martinez-Diaz and Ngaire Woods,