In this blog, Caroline Sweetman, editor of G&D, writes about the shared political project that underpins the feminist research agenda.

I think I have finally identified the culprit for the dismal state of many academic conferences and most NGO meetings – the CIA Sabotage Field Manual (1941). Example: ‘Make “speeches”. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.’ ht Shit Academics Say. Rukmini Banerjee of Pratham describes its 20-year partnership with economics Nobelists Esther Duflo and & Abhijit Banerjee

As the impacts of global heating are already being felt and we are warned of the irreversible impacts, Maria Tanyag (@maria_tanyag) reflects on how an intersectional lens, an ethics of care, and women’s situated knowledge will increasingly prove to be key and advantageous tools for confronting the climate crisis. Maria Tanyag is a Lecturer at the Department of International Relations, Coral

Civicus, the international network of civil society organizations, has some really interesting work on how donors and INGOs can get their act together in supporting the grassroots. Take your pick from the short summary, the full report (by Jennie Richmond, Matt Jackson & Bethany Eckley of impact works) or a short op-ed. Or just read these excerpts: The problem: A

Pierre Basimise Ngalishi Kanyegere is a researcher for the Land Rush project and an IT technician at ISDR-BUKAVU. This piece is part of the new “Bukavu Series” blog posts by the GIC Network. In the DRC, academic research is very often conducted within the framework of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These organizations commission research to support their activities. One might call such a shift

I’ve been doing a fair amount of blog training recently, whether for students, academics, NGOs or other aid agencies. It’s fun but quite time consuming, and I recently realized (not for the first time), that I’m actually pretty redundant. If I post the slides (below) and some suggestions for structure, pretty much anyone can run a training session. Job done.

Just got back from 10 days in Goma in DR Congo. No, this post won’t be about Ebola (which mercifully hasn’t taken hold in the city) or conflict (ditto). I was there to interview dozens of officials and NGOs about public services, especially water. And the topic of this post is the difficulty of talking about an omnipresent, but highly

Open Access (OA) week is drawing to a close, so I thought I’d take a look at the stats for How Change Happens, published three years ago this week. They were pretty mind blowing, at least for an author. HCH was published by Oxford University Press and has been OA since day 1 – you can download the pdf for

In this meta-reflection for Power Shifts, Farida Bena urges us to rethink what expertise means within the development and aid sector, and to address the organizational and structural barriers that hinder the transformation of this concept into a more justice-oriented one

I recently caught up with Prachi Srivastava, of the University of Western Ontario, who’s my go-to person on the heated development debates on public v private schools. Private v Public: I started working on this topic 18 years ago as a doctoral student. We were just entering the MDG and Education for All (EFA) era and at that time, rightfully

Went to the big and fascinating conference put on by the Effective States in International Development (ESID) programme last month (see Sam Hickey’s podcast for what it was all about). But the structure didn’t live up to some excellent content. 3 days of plenary-panel-plenary-panel. Some things have got better – the organizers largely avoided manels, for example. But overall, the

At the end of a mind-bending 3 day conference on the findings of Manchester University’s ESID programme since 2011, I sat down with one of its masterminds, Sam Hickey and asked him to summarize it. He thinks and talks scarily fast, but stay with it – it’s great. We have summarized our findings as 3 Cs: Context, Capacity and Coalitions