Autumn/fall must be the blue skying season. I ended last week having my remaining brain cells picked in exchange for yet another free meal by Amnesty International’s Savio Carvalho (campaigns and advocacy) and Clare Doube (evaluation and strategy). Going to have to watch my waistline. They are thinking through Amnesty’s global strategy for 2016-2019, and as with many INGOs, want

This guest post comes from Mathieu Vervynckt, Policy & Research Analyst with the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) The Third UN Conference on Financing for Development(FfD), set to take place in Addis Ababa next year, will be a crucial opportunity to discuss two of the hottest topics in development finance today: the use of scarce public resources to

Alex Cobham, of the Center for Global Development (@alexcobham), welcomes Oxfam’s new inequality campaign, argues for making inequality a core part of the post-2015 framework, and comes over all French Revolution on wealth registers and cake (the eating of). International acceptance of stark economic inequalities reflects a grand political failure. A failure that locks in the wasting of human potential for

Guest post from Hannah Stoddart, currently managing Oxfam’s advocacy and influencing in Rwanda (but normally Head of Policy, Food and Climate Justice at Oxfam GB) Last week Oxfam launched its first ever report condemning the fossil fuel industry as the main barrier to action on climate change. Oxfam joins a growing movement that recognises that tackling the power of the

Today Oxfam launches Even It Up, its big new inequality campaign. For me, the most striking killer fact from the launch report: ‘The number of billionaires has doubled since the financial crisis, as inequality spirals out of control. In the same period, at least a million mothers have died in childbirth due to a lack of basic health services.’ Although

Today is Blog Action Day, and we’re all supposed to blog about inequality. Ricardo Fuentes (Oxfam Head of Research) & his team are even marking the day by kicking off a new inequality-themed blog, Mind the Gap – check it out. I’ve already done my more general call to arms for BAD, so here’s something more in keeping with this blog’s usual

Spoke last week as a ‘discussant’ (my favourite speaking role, no prep required) at the launch of an extraordinary new ODI paper, with the deeply forgettable title ‘rural wages in Asia’ (we’ll come back to the title later). In one of those papers that restores your faith in economists, Steve Wiggins and Sharada Keats crunch the available data on 13

I wrote this puff for Blog Action Day on 16th Oct – it appeared on Oxfam International’s site earlier this week. If you’re a blogger and want to join in the inequality theme, sign up here. A few years ago I was touring the US to promote my book, From Poverty to Power, which focuses on inequality and redistribution. Big

Oxfam’s launching a big global campaign on inequality in October and as always, there are some fascinating internal meta-discussions about the pros and cons of different kinds of campaigns. A few years ago, we launched ‘Grow’, an attempt to run a campaign based on positive framing (a positive vision for the future of food, life and planet, with a focus

Last week I headed off to the Kennington Tandoori for one of those enjoyable food-fuelled brainstorms that seem to happen during the summer lull. This one was with two disability campaigners – Mosharraf Hossain and Tim Wainwright of ADD International. ADD is doing some brilliant work supporting the emergence of Disabled People’s Organizations in Africa and Asia. ADD is at

As I begin work on the book on How Change Happens (no I haven’t written it yet, please stop asking), I’m collecting good analyses of social/political change processes. So thanks Bert Maerten for sending a fascinating account of the same-sex marriage movement in the US, by Paul and Mark Englers. The speed of the change is breathtaking: As of 1990,

One of my main functions within Oxfam seems to be to review books to spare everyone else the effort. Last week, I was on Piketty duty. Batches of campaigns and policy types sat in suitable veneration around a copy of the giant tome, and I talked them through this two page ‘Pocket Piketty’. The Potted Piketty (longer summary here) From