Guest post from Oxfam’s Thomas Dunmore-Rodriguez Applying a theory of change approach is hard, and in the current context just got a whole lot harder. Theories of change tend to be abstract, intangible, and largely hypothetical, so given the unpredictability of the COVID-affected world, are they still useful for activists seeking to strategize for positive social change? Recently a group

Cause for celebration. The Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like blog is back! Ten humanitarian crises and trends to watch in 2021 Branko Milanovic in reflective mode is always illuminating. 3 moments of cognitive dissonance where he was taken by surprise by those around him. We should all write our own versions (spoilt for change – Brexit, Trump, Thatcher etc etc).

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Christopher Choong Weng Wai is the Deputy Director of Research at Khazanah Research Institute in Malaysia and an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics. His research interest is in the everyday reproduction of poverty, inequalities and exclusion. He tweets at @chrischoongww. For those of us who work on public policy

LSE’s Cutting Edge Issues lecture series is back! The first lecture of 2021 will be with Ha Joon Chang on “Building Pro-Developmental Multilateralism” (Friday 22 January at 4pm GMT, streamed here). The rest of term is pretty good too….. Nic Cheeseman’s ‘Dictators’ post election playbook’. Uganda seems to be going for a full house ☹ Home schooling section: Struggling to

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On Wednesday I was subjected to a gruelling cross-examination on Life, the Universe and Everything (actually ‘How Change Happens’) for the entertainment of some Cambridge Accountancy students. Here’s some of the less embarrassing bits. Q: How do you stop yourself feeling overwhelmed by complexity? A: It’s only overwhelming if you think you’re ever going to understand it all. Once you

Nuff said ht Declan Walsh ‘What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all,

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Some good 2020 round-ups for those who were a bit distracted last year and want to catch up Top Africa Stories of the Year 2020 New Humanitarian most read posts of 2020 Highlights from the LSE Africa Centre blog Worldwide Protests in 2020: Carnegie Endowment The Best of 2020: What We Read While the World Burned Around Us (Research Edition)

I like to kick off a new year on the blog by looking back to the one that’s just ended. I have to say, 2020 was in some ways a vintage year for bloggers (if not for anyone else). Lots of people stuck at home, with nothing better to do than surf social media, I guess. FP2P’s total numbers came

One of the bright spots in a generally crap year has been the Emergent Agency project. It emerged in the early weeks of the pandemic from a brief conversation with Armine Ishkanian, who runs the LSE’s Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme. Would Covid lead to new forms of grassroots organization? Wouldn’t it be interesting to monitor