Had an interesting chat recently (Chatham House rule, so no names) with some people wondering what a philanthropic funder with a bit of money and little/no bureaucratic constraints could do to encourage the uptake of evidence in policy making. After swiftly batting away any suggestion of a new database (cyber tumbleweed), we got onto some practical steps – please add

I’m always on the lookout for good guides to the practical implications of systems thinking, so got very excited when I came across Systems Thinking and Practice: A guide to concepts, principles and tools for FCDO and partners, by Jim Woodhill and Juliet Millican. Its 38 pages are stuffed full of crisp summaries of the main ideas, case studies applying

After the Zoom years, lots of us are now back in the lecture theatre/other forms of real life contact and exchange. Intoxicating, in many ways. But I’m also struck that it feels the same, but different, to the pre-Covid world, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts about getting the most out of these encounters, partly for readers,

Ever since Matt Griffiths and I came up with the ‘cowfact’ in the early 2000s, I’ve been struck by the power of ‘killer facts’ in NGO communications (heck, even Fidel Castro used Oxfam ones). But things have moved on, and now we live in a more visual, tweetable age of ‘killer graphics’. So if killer facts reveal an injustice through

Ha-Joon Chang on Economics v Science Fiction, and other great ways to end your weeks this autumn – the LSE’s Cutting Edge lectures are back Heads up for this year’s LSE ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’ lecture series, which kicks off next Friday (14th October). We’re moving into hybrid mode this year, with a mix of online

Since in-real-life contact resumed, I have been to some classically terrible academic seminars (which took me back to this 2016 cathartic rant). Here are my notes from one recent purgatorial experience: ‘Forgotten just how bad academic seminars can be (come back Covid, all is forgiven!): Not reading the room (full of people who know the context), so they spend most

There’s been an upsurge in recent decades in tackling problems by trying to change the behaviour of individuals – behavioural economics, nudge theory and a proliferation of government ‘nudge units’. Now two disillusioned proponents, Nick Chater and George Loewenstein, have written an important critique of the whole thing, contrasting what they call the ‘i (individual) frame’ with the ‘s (system)

Nothing says ‘this needs a blog’ more than an over-long executive summary…. So here’s a summary and a few thoughts on ITAD’s report for the Gates Foundation on Champions: How to identify, support, and evaluate advocates for social change (full report 134 pages, Exec Sum 11 pages). I liked this because the aid sector is not always very thoughtful on

I’m not a great fan of post-growth/degrowth debates – not enough emphasis on how to actually change policy for my liking (compared to the ‘I’m right, the planet is frying, why won’t you listen!’ school of advocacy). But a new paper by the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity caught my eye because it explores precisely that interface between

Guest post by Roba Aldaour, an Oxfam Public Health and WASH practitioner in Gaza We recently tried to find out how aid practitioners and affected populations think about Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and how they differ in their views. The results of our survey hold important lessons for WASH programmes and their funders around the world. Unsurprisingly, the top

Guest post by Ravi Kanbur, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez and Andy Sumner Global Inequality 101: Global inequality is the distribution of income across all people on the planet from the poorest to the richest. It can be measured with the ‘Gini’ which ranges from 1 (a totally unequal planet or one person gets everything) to 0 (a totally equal planet). Global inequality

Guest post by Pablo Suarez, who seems to be willing to try almost anything to get the climate crisis message across. And who can blame him? What? A fitness dance video about an IPCC report, in a humanitarian website? Here’s the story: A recent report, entitled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability , offers  rigorous and extremely  concerning scientific