Women, Voice and Power, Oxfam’s new paper on ‘transformative feminist leadership’ exemplifies why I love working for NGOs, but also why it can get a bit irksome, especially if you’re a wordsmith. Let’s start with the good stuff. The 7 page Exec Sum (the full report weighs in at 45 pages) is stuffed full with great literature summaries, case studies,

Extreme multi-stakeholder consultation… ht Richard Cunliffe The Data Manipulation Scandal that could topple the heads of the World Bank & IMF. Superb analysis of the Doing Business scandal by Justin Sandefur. Should be required reading for public policy/international development students. It also shows the extraordinary power of league tables in advocacy How to Destroy a Country: Does Ethiopia Have a

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My Oxfam colleague and regular FP2P contributor Max Lawson (right) sends out a weekly summary of his reading on inequality (he leads Oxfam’s advocacy work on it). They’re great, and Max has opened his mailing list up to the anyone who’s interested – just email max.lawson@oxfam.org, with ‘subscribe’ in the subject line. Here’s his latest effort (and thanks to Rakesh Rajani for suggesting the

Gotta love the fuel shortage v Brexit cartoons. Here’s another cracker – please add your own Nigel Farage also doing his bit to keep us amused. Thoughts and prayers for the father of Brexit. And the BBC got in on the nominative determinism game. Ladies and Gents, please welcome … Phil McCann Just a few weeks after Liz Truss became

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Throughout the pandemic, social protection practitioners have been drawing on past experience and established ‘mantras’ to support governments and emergency actors to respond to the crisis. Valentina Barca, the Team Lead for the FCDO-GIZ-DFAT-funded SPACE service shares reflections on whether and how these mantras have been taken up. COVID-19 caught us all by surprise. The social protection sector was no exception. Often

This year’s Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice series kicks off at the LSE this Friday – 1st October. After that it’s every Friday from 4-6pm UK time (except for reading week on 5th November, when we all have a lie down). So why not bunk off work a bit early and start your weekend with some great

UK migration policy co/ The New European Good early backgrounder on COP26 from CNN The online pile-on over the deeply naff and questionable CBS ‘reality’ TV show that pits activists against each other in an X-factor style piece of nonsense has triggered a rethink from the organizers and this fine set of alternative suggestions. The whole furore seems oddly absent

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I’ve come to recognize a certain format for ‘inspirational books for activists’: big sweeping statement about What Needs to Happen, then what I call ‘thousand points of light’ – breathless accounts of some activist-led efforts to achieve those goals. On to the call to arms, invoking political will. Job Done. I must be getting (even more) jaded. What’s wrong with

What are the most prevalent unintended effects of international cooperation? Dirk Jan Koch, together with the Center for Global Challenges of Utrecht University, analyzed all project evaluations by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs since the turn of the century. Here’s the top 10. The figures in brackets show the number of