I’m heading off this weekend for (almost) the last leg of the FP2P promo tour. I’m doing quite a few public lectures/conversations if anyone out there wants to come along. If you want to meet up on the margins/for a beer, let me know. Here’s what we know so far. If there’s no link that means it’s either not a public

Last week I spoke at a Brussels conference on inequality, organized by the Belgian NGO coalition 11.11.11. Inequality is flavour of the month right now, showing surprising staying power within the post-2015 process and elsewhere. Inequality gabfests usually involve violent agreement that inequality is indeed a Bad Thing, lots of evidence for why this is the case, and polite disagreements

I’m consistently astonished by how little we know about the important stuff in development. Take the Millennium Development Goals – the basis forinnumerable aid debates, campaigns, and negotiations. A large chunk of the MDG agenda concerns the size and quality of public spending – on health, education, water, sanitation etc. So obviously, the first thing we need is to know

Oh boy, I have a greatest hits album. This blog was launched back in 2008 to help promote the first edition of From Poverty to Power, but rapidly acquired an identity and readership of its own. I reckon there’s about half a million words or so up there now, and some of them have to be worth reading (monkeys, typewriters

Monday’s post had Rob Nash arguing that the World Bank has got itself into a tangle on land grabs. Now Coldplay have decided to add their rather more harmonious voice, with the help of crowd-sourced footage from 7000 supporters in 55 countries. The Bank has promptly responded to Coldplay (not to Rob, sorry Rob) with a tweet ‘@WorldBank: .@coldplay protecting

For a wonk parent it’s hard to beat the heart-warming experience of seeing your book referenced in your son’s university essay. In this case, junior had the task of trying to understand the link between neoliberalism and the rise of a new left in Latin America, so he cited Silent Revolution, a book I first published in 1995, when he

Today sees the launch of the Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI), produced by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) with funding from Irish Aid and DFID. It looks like it could become one of the more useful annual league tables. It may not be seen as a progressive view in the UK, but I’m a big league table fan,

Hopefully back tomorrow to review the new European Report on Development

How do we analyse the stories of change that we all use in development? Such stories shape narratives, illustrate approaches and enrich our understanding of how change happens. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is a running theme, but I’m now about to step it up, working with colleagues across Oxfam and beyond to collect and use

This week is acquiring an oddly retro flavour. Wednesday had me reminiscing about the Access to Medicines campaign of the last decade. Now it turns out that the issues it raised have recently erupted again. In short, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are trying to get another extension to be free from implementing the WTO’s Intellectual Property (TRIPs) agreement. The

Continuing on the ‘new development threats’ theme of yesterday’s post on Big Tobacco, the latest issue of the World Bank’s Food Price Watch looks at the links between increasing food price volatility and obesity. A blog post by the Bank’s José Cuesta starts with a nice counter-intuitive quiz (below). The correct answers, by the way are C, B and C.

Of the big reports that spew forth from the multilateral system, some break new ground in terms of research or narratives, while others usefully recap the latest thinking on a given issue. Last week’s 2013 Human Development Report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, falls into the latter category, pulling together the evidence for a