Laura German is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, and author of Power/Knowledge/Land: Contested Ontologies of Land and its Governance in Africa (University of Michigan Press) Duncan: I’m really pleased about this conversation because I’m way out of date on this topic. This is about land ownership and what we used to call land grabs. I last worked

Guest post by  Jane Lonsdale and Joanne Choe. This post was first published on the DevPolicy blog Questions that repeatedly come up when supporting reform programs include: how do we work with local politics to influence change without reinforcing existing elitism and capture of power? How do we “dance with the system” whilst at the same time trying to change the system?

British (or British adjacent) readers will by now probably have digested the main headlines of yesterday’s budget, but Katy Chakrabortty digs deeper in this guest post. Since election manifestos tend to appear only twice a decade, party leadership pledges can be made in TV debates and quietly forgotten and the King’s Speech is delivered with an air of regal deference,

A tribute by Craig Castro Robin Palmer, Oxfam GB (OGB)’s former global land advisor, passed away on Sunday 19 February 2023. He was a wonderful friend and colleague from whom I personally learned so much about land and property rights in Africa. As a regional advisor for OGB in southern Africa, I worked closely with Robin in organizing a landmark

Particularly liked the series of rather splendid blogs for International Women’s Day, written by our amazing LSE students. Here’s my favourite, not least because of the lovely blogging style: Does digitalised social protection worsen exclusion for women? by Divija Samria Here’s the deal: digitisation of delivery mechanisms in public programs is increasingly being used to improve targeted approaches, reduce out-of-system

Victoria Stetsko introduces Oxfam’s “Feminist Power” campaign for International Women’s Day, where it will be celebrating organisations across the globe fighting for rights and respect for women and queer people “Hearts starve as well as bodies: give us bread, but give us roses,” sang striking women workers in the early 20th century United States. That movement’s famous demand for “Bread

In recent years, Oxfam’s been doing some pioneering work on the ‘care economy’, aka the bit Adam Smith left out (example here and here). My uninformed mental image of this had been all about the role of parents, generally mothers, in running the household and bringing up the kids, so I was struck by a recent Economist piece on 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

To mark this year’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, Oxfam’s Dana Abed introduces its new report: The Assault of Austerity: How prevailing economic policy choices are a form of gender-based violence, (here’s the online summary with graphics).This post first appeared on Oxfam’s Views and Voices blog Feminist economists have warned for years that the global economic system is violent

Well that was intense. We’ve just come to the end of a one year programme to design and deliver a training course on ‘influencing’ to senior aid leaders (UN, INGOs, Red Cross/Crescent and National NGOs). 6 months to design the materials and methodology; the rest to deliver the training to 6 cohorts of 25 people in 5 locations around the

Imposter Syndrome – doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. (Almost) everyone has it, even old lags like me. Just because I’ve become relaxed about banging on in front of an audience, doesn’t mean I’ve stopped living in fear of someone pointing at me and saying ‘you don’t really know what you’re talking about, do you?’ Luckily, the only

Oxfam’s Amy Croome reports back on a very different kind of localization discussion What happens when you bring together local activists and organisations to discuss how to reform the humanitarian system? I recently found out, attending a conference, where more than 85% of the speakers and moderators were from national and local organisations (compared to not even 10% at the