Even though it’s relatively short (223 pages), Working With the Grain (WWTG) took me two months to finish, but I’m glad I did. It adds to a growing and significant body of literature on ‘doing development differently’/’thinking and working politically’ – Matt Andrews, Adrian Leftwich, David Booth, Diana Cammack, Sue Unsworth etc. (Like Matt and Adrian, WWTG author Brian Levy

Sometimes, with heavy heart, I pick up yet another example of ‘grey literature’ only to find I’ve wandered into an Aladdin’s cave of ideas. That was my sensation on reading Tim Kelsall’s new paper for the Developmental Leadership Program, on ‘Authoritarianism, democracy and development’. In just 14 pages, he summarizes a huge literature, with the aim of boiling it all down

I’ve been both engaged and excited by a lot of the recent networking on ‘thinking and working politically’/’doing development differently’, which emphasizes the importance of understanding and working with the grain of local context, and a project cycle which replaces ‘The Plan’ with a messy process of trying, failing, learning and adapting (and trying again). But one anxiety I have

This probably doesn’t need saying, but the World Development Report is a big deal. The World Bank’s annual flagships have a track record of shaping debates on particular issues, and raising them up the endlessly churning development agenda. So it pays to pay attention. This year’s WDR, published this month, is on ‘Mind, Society and Behaviour’. I (like most people)

A few years ago, I was struck by the fervour with which a student activist acquaintance of mine, Stefan Baskerville, talked about the Living Wage. Every holiday he would leave his life of student activism (and occasional study) in Oxford and head for the East End of London, where he worked for Citizens UK, a community organization, in a campaign

This post also appears on the ‘Practice for Change’ blog I try to avoid those endless bouts of INGO navel gazing, but don’t always succeed. Which is lucky, because recently, I had a really interesting session on ‘the future of INGOs’ at La Trobe University’s Institute for Human Security and Social Change in Melbourne. I kicked off summarising a recent

[Mojo: NOUN (plural mojos), chiefly US: A magic charm, talisman, or spell] I got back from Malta on Friday, just in time to watch the end of the House of Commons debate on enshrining in British law the longstanding, but widely ignored, international commitment to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income on international development. By an overwhelming majority (146 to 5), the bill passed. It still has to go

The SDGs/post 2015 debate just got interesting. Regular readers of this blog will know that up to now I have been a convinced sceptic on the post-2015 circus (see this 2012 paper on why). But now the endless attempt to hang more/fewer development baubles on the SDG Christmas Tree is coming to an end, and we are coming to the moment

This is a short piece written for UNDP, which is organizing my Kapuscinski lecture in Malta on Wednesday (4pm GMT, webcast live) Power is intangible, but crucial; a subtle and pervasive force field connecting individuals, communities and nations in a constant process of negotiation, contestation and change. Development is, at its heart, about the redistribution and accumulation of power by

Had a great day at Oxfam Australia last week, immersed in a series of conversations that were dotted with ‘synaptic moments’, when different bits of thinking come together in your head and a lightbulb goes on. Three examples: Whose private sector is it anyway? The drumbeat of private sector rhetoric is deafening in Australia’s aid sector. This seems to worry

Final post on PNG trip, after overview and paean to roads and leadership. Field trips operate on several different mental levels. Superficially, you are seeing new communities and programmes, and learning about the country. But there is also a constant process of interpretation, where you compare what you are seeing with what you have been reading back home or seen elsewhere, and

Yesterday, I described the grim state of PNG politics and administration, but the Aussies decided to send me to an outlier (in both senses) – the remote inland district of Nuku. Nuku is in the middle of a fascinating mini-transformation, and DFAT is pretty excited about it. That transformation forced me to question two of my extensive array of NGO