After the Zoom years, lots of us are now back in the lecture theatre/other forms of real life contact and exchange. Intoxicating, in many ways. But I’m also struck that it feels the same, but different, to the pre-Covid world, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts about getting the most out of these encounters, partly for readers,

What is the point of all the noise on human rights violations, all that ‘speaking truth to power’ to repressive regimes who don’t listen, if no-one is ever brought to justice? When all those lawyers, Amnesty reports, email campaigns and UN treaties simply bounce off the brute realities of national power? Kate Cronin-Furman’s intriguing new book uses a political economy

Thanks to Ivan Campbell for alerting me to this really good (and brief) paper from Peace Direct, looking at useful roles for INGOs as intermediaries, as they seek to localize and/or step back from direct implementation. Edited down version below. In recent years, there has been growing scrutiny of the largely unchanged role that INGOs have played in humanitarian, development

Check out this 7m video of my recent trip to Papua New Guinea. It was commissioned by The Voice Inc, one of the partner organizations for the Building Community Engagement in Papua New Guinea (BCEP) programme I’m working with in PNG. I have to say, I’ve never been the subject of anything so slick and well made, (my wife Cathy

Neil McCulloch introduces his new book Hands up if you would like petrol prices to go up?  I’m guessing not too many hands.  The cripplingly high costs of energy (whether petrol, diesel, gas or coal as well as electricity) have posed a huge challenge for households and firms all around the world.  Massive increases in these costs, driven by the

Oxfam has a new paper out this week on how the IMF engages with civil society around the world. A bit process-y, I know, but this is good – based on a lot of serious case studies and coming up with the odd surprise (notably Ghana, highlighted below). My summary of the summary: ‘The International Monetary Fund (IMF or ‘the

Guest Post from Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford ‘Once again, humanitarians are bogged down in a moral predicament in Afghanistan. The extreme misogyny of Taliban policy is back and international humanitarian agencies should refuse to cooperate with it. The Taliban’s initial tolerance of gender equality in

Been catching up with my reading backlog over the Christmas break…. According to the publisher’s blurb ‘Africa 2.0 provides an important history of how two technologies – mobile calling and internet – were made available to millions of sub-Saharan Africans, and the impact they have had on their lives. The book deals with the political challenges of liberalisation and privatisation

Guest post from Jonathan Glennie, cofounder of Global Nation, a thinktank, and author of The Future of Aid: Global Public Investment As we approach Christmas our thoughts naturally turn to the coming of a saviour. No, not Jesus. Bob Geldof. I actually like Bob Geldof. At least he bothered. While many will see him as the epitome of arrogant world-saving

Dante Dalabajan and Ruth Mayne introduce a new Oxfam research report – produced by staff and partners from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, US and Europe. The paper investigates the implications of the clean energy transition for lower-income countries and communities and asks how the world can achieve a truly just, as well as fast, transition. As acknowledged at the recent

Guest post from Laura Adams, Director of Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning at CSM-STAND, a USAID-funded global civil society and media program, led by Pact. When international development programs want people to get vaccinated, the behavior they are targeting is clear, even if the complex set of things that influence that behavior take time and effort to address. Social and

Saleemul Huq, one of the most persistent long-term advocates of a ‘loss and damage’ fund on climate change, explores the origins and potential of the breakthrough at the recent COP. For thirty years the vulnerable developing countries led by the small island states had been demanding under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) the creation of a fund