The Action for Empowerment and Accountability research consortium, led by IDS and with quite a lot of involvement from Oxfam (including me) is now winding up with the customary emission of academic papers (think puffballs reaching maturity). One of these is a whole issue of Development Policy Review (now Open Access – yay!) on ‘Citizen Action for Accountability in Challenging

Yuen Yuen Ang is a rising star in International Development scholarship. Understandably, she doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed as ‘the China person’ despite her brilliant book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, and has written more global works on corruption, among other things. But in a recent paper, she returns to the topic of China – analysing the combination of

My last trip pre-Covid was to the DRC, to look at a water project in Goma, and the resulting research paper (co-authored with Patrycja Stys, Tom Kirk and Tom Mosquera) has just been published (yep, just three and a half years later). It charts an attempt by MercyCorps to drive change in a water sector that has massively failed citizens in the

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,

If you hang around conversations on ‘thinking and working politically’, as I do, you’ll hear a lot of references to ‘Political Settlements’ as it’s grown up, more academic, but sometimes incomprehensible cousin. As this new book’s blurb declares ‘At its most ambitious, ‘political settlements analysis’ (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions for their successful

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

Guest post from Anthony Kamande on Oxfam’s Davos Inequality Report 2023 I’m having supper with my friend Reuben, a teacher who still hasn’t received last month’s salary (equivalent to around $167) and is struggling with the cost of living. I tell him that if the 1,890 richest Kenyans, those with wealth over Ksh600 million ($5 million), paid as little as

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

Max Lawson introduces Oxfam’s 2023 Davos report, ‘Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality’ Walter is the father of my son’s best friend at school. He works nights as a security guard at a bank in the City of London. He has three kids. They are really struggling, as the prices of everything

Teaching is weird. You engage on quite an intense level with each year’s cohort of students, and then they fly the nest, and you hear very little about what happens next. Still less whether their studies actually helped (I’m still trying to work out whether my Physics degree has been a help or hindrance in grappling with the complexities of

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

As well as the headlines, First Edition, the Guardian’s excellent daily news summary (free subscription here), includes an in-depth conversation between the editor and one of its specialist journalists. Yesterday’s, with environment correspondent Damien Gayle, was on ‘Extinction Rebellion’s New Year’s Day statement, which led with the headline-grabbing phrase “we quit”’. Not true, apparently. Here’s the Guardian’s analysis: ‘This is