Six months in, the ‘Emerging Agency in a time of Covid’ project is coming along nicely, and starting to generate some interesting insights. We recently spent 90 minutes on a call with the ‘cluster convenors’ – people who have offered to host discussions with groups of people around the world on particular issues (faith organizations, social movements, women’s rights, peace-building

Spent an enjoyable couple of hours last week chatting to some students doing the LSE MSc in Cities course about their group projects. These were aimed at designing initiatives to promote different aspects of sustainability and emissions reductions in major cities: Montreal (building regulations);  Bogotá (transport); Freetown (natural habitat) and Amsterdam (consumption). We covered some standard ground that I talk

In the run up to digital Davos this year, I got into a conversation with Jenny Ricks of the Fight Inequality Alliance about the huge growth in campaigning on inequality. On the one hand, inequality is clearly an important and pressing issue (I won’t rehearse the arguments here). But it’s also really multi-faceted – wealth, income, but also gender, ethnicity,

Guest post by Florencia Guerzovich, Soledad Gattoni, and Dave Algoso Anyone working for change knows that timing matters. You can see your efforts stall and spin for years, before finally you break through. What made that possible? Sometimes it’s your persistence, wearing down opposition like water carving a canyon. But sometimes it’s a change that came from outside your work—a

Guest post by Mitchell Watkins & Professor Mushtaq Khan (SOAS University of London) Our research in Bangladesh identifies two practical ways to make climate change adaptation funding more effective. First, anti-corruption monitoring is more effective when led by locally influential households; secondly and more importantly, their involvement can be increased by designing adaptation projects to maximize ‘dual use’, ensuring that

In October 2020, Chileans voted overwhelmingly to create a new constitution. If Chileans are to capitalise on this historic opportunity, says Maria Carrasco, an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at LSE, they must dare to dream of bold new ways to address their problems and guide our institutions. That includes focusing on the environment, happiness and economies of

Survey results

This post by Jomo Kwame Sundaram was first posted on the IPS website Covid-19 infection and death rates in the Western world and many developing countries in Asia and Latin America have long overtaken East Asia since the second quarter of 2020. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering prevailing Western accounts of the Asian financial crises, there have been no serious efforts to

On Wednesday I was subjected to a gruelling cross-examination on Life, the Universe and Everything (actually ‘How Change Happens’) for the entertainment of some Cambridge Accountancy students. Here’s some of the less embarrassing bits. Q: How do you stop yourself feeling overwhelmed by complexity? A: It’s only overwhelming if you think you’re ever going to understand it all. Once you

Teniola Tayo argues that African cooperation is gaining momentum, but big challenges lie ahead. This post was first published on the ISS blog The start of trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement on 1 January 2021 marks the dawn of a new era in Africa’s development journey. Over time, the AfCFTA will eliminate import tariffs on

Crises act as tipping points. Local crises and conflicts can galvanize a social movement or discredit a leader in a given location. Global crises change far more than that – the 2008 financial crisis has been credited with everything from sparking the rise of right-wing populism (hopefully now heading for a historical dustbin near you) to transforming norms around inequality

Signing off from a grim 2020 by reprinting this Christmas editorial from The Economist, which I found both thought-provoking and consoling. Warren Harding built a campaign for the presidential election in 1920 around his new word “normalcy”. It was an appeal to Americans’ supposed urge to forget the horrors of the first world war and the Spanish flu and turn back