My Oxfam colleague and regular FP2P contributor Max Lawson (right) sends out a weekly summary of his reading on inequality (he leads Oxfam’s advocacy work on it). They’re great, and Max has opened his mailing list up to the anyone who’s interested – just email max.lawson@oxfam.org, with ‘subscribe’ in the subject line. Here’s his latest effort (and thanks to Rakesh Rajani for suggesting the

Throughout the pandemic, social protection practitioners have been drawing on past experience and established ‘mantras’ to support governments and emergency actors to respond to the crisis. Valentina Barca, the Team Lead for the FCDO-GIZ-DFAT-funded SPACE service shares reflections on whether and how these mantras have been taken up. COVID-19 caught us all by surprise. The social protection sector was no exception. Often

I’ve come to recognize a certain format for ‘inspirational books for activists’: big sweeping statement about What Needs to Happen, then what I call ‘thousand points of light’ – breathless accounts of some activist-led efforts to achieve those goals. On to the call to arms, invoking political will. Job Done. I must be getting (even more) jaded. What’s wrong with

What are the most prevalent unintended effects of international cooperation? Dirk Jan Koch, together with the Center for Global Challenges of Utrecht University, analyzed all project evaluations by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs since the turn of the century. Here’s the top 10. The figures in brackets show the number of

It has come to my attention that in some parts of the northern hemisphere, people were away during chunks of late July/August on some retro exercise apparently known as ‘holidays’. Mary Sue Smiaroski suggested I help with their re-entry by linking to some of the best FP2P posts they may have missed while away. No probs – always happy to

Nicola Nixon, Stefaan Verhulst, Imran Matin & Philips J. Vermonte explore a really interesting initiative to crowdsource the most important current issues on the governance agenda. Late last year, we – the Governance Lab at NYU, the CSIS Indonesia, the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, Bangladesh and The Asia Foundation – joined forces across New York, Jakarta, Dhaka, Hanoi,

Guest post by a friend working on Myanmar, who for obvious reasons would prefer to remain anonymous In a fast-moving violent crisis like the one in Myanmar, a lot of the most interesting analysis goes unpublished for obvious reasons – the safety of individuals or organizations. I’ve been working with a (suitably anonymous) national and international team on a series

The British NGO network BOND recently published a report on ‘catalysing locally-led development in the UK aid system’, which summarizes a six month project involving dozens of people from different aid organizations. I have to confess that I started reading with low expectations – there are a lot of pious exhortations on localization, which all too often ignore crucial issues

Guest post by Will Paxton, International Director at Kivu  The 1st of September marks seven months since Myanmar’s military coup.  In that time over 700 Myanmar people have been killed in brutal military crackdowns, the economy has been ravaged, and conflict has rumbled on.  Uncertainty defines Myanmar’s future. The military government appears to have consolidated power, but economic, political, Covid,

More than 200 scientists from 66 countries have worked together to assess knowledge on just the physical science basis of climate change. Their answers were released yesterday in the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I. The IPCC’s findings are clear, rigorous, and very concerning, but they are couched in formal, technical

Guest post from Graham Teskey My friend and colleague Lavinia Tyrell recently posted a note on LinkedIn, highlighting a recent WB Independent Evaluation Group report, which reflected on various methods of monitoring and evaluation currently used in development. In so doing, Lavinia referenced this diagram: As a fan of diagrams, as well as a long-time user of both the London

As part of writing a paper with the overall findings from our ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid’ project, I’ve been catching up with some fascinating recent work from the Philippines, where Oxfam and the Philippine Sociological Society are publishing a fascinating series of case studies of civic responses to Covid. They include the Community Pantry Movement, supporting cycling