Generally, I seem to lead a bit of a charmed life on twitter. I know it’s supposed to be full of angry trolls, but my experience is much friendlier than that. I often tweet questions or appeals for advice, and sometimes people really come through. My latest exercise in canvassing the wisdom of crowds was asking for their top tips

Maria Faciolince and I have a paper out in a Development and Change special collection on Open Access in academic publishing (full disclosure: Maria did most of the work). One of the concerns about how OA is playing out is that many journals have responded by introducing ‘author processing charges’ (averaging around £2,000 per article). Instead of readers paying to

Here’s a sentence you don’t often hear. I just read a really interesting conference report. Transforming Change: How Change Really Happens and What we can do about it, by Paul Knox Clarke, summarizes a big 2017 discussion on the drivers of change in the humanitarian system, as well as the blockers. I reported on it at the time, but went

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

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

A rather wonderful twitter thread from Maarten van Smeden went viral recently, so I asked if we could bloggify it and he kindly agreed. Enjoy. How do I know how to become a successful academic? I don’t, but I have received plenty of advice. As a good academic, I will just summarize what I have learned from listening 1) Be

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of diaries as a research tool into issues such as governance and finance. Here Sandrine N’simire, Ishara Tchumisi and Patricia Stys, of LSE’s Centre for Public Authority in International Development, discuss their experiences conducting research using ‘financial diaries’ as part of LSE’s Water Governance project in Goma, DRC. This blog forms part of the Idjwi

While we’re all chewing our nails about the US election, here’s recent LSE Masters student Hanna Toda with a post on how to keep learning while job-hunting. Job applications can be an anxious waiting game for many students who have just finished their degrees. It can also feel exciting and/or overwhelming at how much more there still is to learn

The wheels of academia grind slowly, but eventually grind out some fascinating stuff. Five years ago, I was involved in a series of conversations about the need for research on the history of redistribution in developing countries. What can we learn from low/middle income countries that have actually managed to reduce inequality (a bit like Ha-Joon Chang’s work on trade

It’s Open Access Week this week (what, you’d missed it?), which I generally use as an excuse to do my annual round-up of stats on How Change Happens, and make the case for OA books, not just journals. Bit of background. The book was published by OUP in October 2016. We negotiated open access from day one (download it here).

Guest post by Jennifer Johnson for the Accountability Research Center The COVID-19 pandemic has put unprecedented strain on health care systems around the world. Frontline health workers have faced great risks, from lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) to discrimination and harassment. Some face repercussions for whistleblowing or walkouts. This evolving situation has given rise to a new wave of