Guest post by Chris Barnett, Director of Technical Excellence, Itad Back in the mid-2000s, one project stood out as a bold attempt to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at a local level: The Millennium Villages Project (MVP). Spearheaded by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the project sought to demonstrate how the MDGs could be achieved through an integrated approach to rural

Ploughing through the papers for this week’s big IDS conference of the ‘Action for Accountability and Empowerment’ research consortium (of which Oxfam is a member), a new IDS paper on energy protests jumped out at me. Here’s the brilliant Naomi Hossain summarizing it in an IDS blog: ‘Modern life depends on fuel, even while tackling climate change means cutting subsidies for

I head off to the Institute of Development Studies today to take stock on our joint ‘Action for Empowerment and Accountability’ research programme. One of the main discussions will be on a research agenda on ‘closing civic space’, so this blog sets out what we know of the research to date, and asks you for further suggestions. The best place

Ace number cruncher Max Roser has redrawn the map of the world so that country size is proportional to its population. So large countries with a small population shrink in size – talking about you Canada, Mongolia, Australia, and Russia, and vice versa for heavily populated places like the Netherlands or Japan. Cool eh? And kind of obvious – has

Another (final) round up of the posts you missed over the summer, if you were relying on your daily FP2P email to jog you into clicking through, or were just lounging in the sun. Here’s the main posts that went up from July until we fixed the email notifications a week or so ago Posts on new approaches to aid,

Finding out that someone’s called their new book ‘How Change Happens’, and that it’s about social movements, is disturbing – a bit like finding out that someone who looks just like you has assumed your identity and is chatting to your mates. But the new book by Leslie R Crutchfield ‘How Change Happens: Why some social movements succeed while others

About 6,000 of you have signed up for email notifications of new posts on FP2P, but the system crashed for some reason at the start of June and was only finally fixed last week. Now the notifications are back up, here’s an annotated guide to what you missed. 3 months-worth of posts is a hell of a lot, so I’ll

Back to blogging after a fab holiday at the Edinburgh fringe. A wonderful statue in Berlin, entitled “Politicians Discussing Global Warming.” Oxfam America has come up with a ‘Best States to Work Index’ comparing labour conditions across US states. Washington, DC ranks first in the nation and neighbouring Virginia ranks last. ‘”There are grassroots leaders of movements against discrimination &

Taking a blog break for a couple of weeks. Off to the Edinburgh festival, where each year I try to cram in enough plays, music and other events to replenish my parched cultural hinterland for the rest of the year. By the time you read this, I will have embarrassed myself by taking part in the Guru Dudu silent disco,

Maybe it’s the summer lull, or my fading attention span (off on hols next week), but it all seems to be graphics and videos this week. The gig economy ht Robert Went Soccer girl power. Gotta love her swagger. She’s speaking Farsi, apparently – anyone know the origin of this wonderful 30 sec clip? Francis Fukuyama on What’s Wrong with

I recently visited Tanzania to look at adaptive management in the Institutions for Inclusive Development (I4ID) programme, a big (£12m over 5 years) project that is trying to use AM approaches in a fast-closing political space (more on that to follow, once Irene Guijt and I finish the draft paper). One highlight was watching some top convening and brokering in

A summary of Elinor Ostrom’s (only woman to win the Nobel for economics) ‘rules for radicals’ from Derek Wall’s new book. Wish she’d done a systems version of no 13 though – complex is not the same as complicated, simple or chaotic Academic spats are always fun. Here it’s profs v PhD students at the LSE & London School of