…gender blind and governance around this issue cannot be either. Where government fail in an equitable response, many civil society groups are trying to address gaps through intersectional and gender-focused…
Getting to the ‘so whats’: how can donors use political economy analysis to sort out bad governance?
…that researchers have not found a middle ground between generality and specificity. On the one hand, the use of catch-all concepts, such as political will or unspecified incentives, fail to…
The case for democracy – a new study on India, South Africa and Brazil (shame it’s not much good – missed opportunity)
…use the many rights, freedoms, processes, and institutions that comprise democracy to improve institutions when they falter or fail: fight the scourge of corruption; argue for rule of law, an…
Urban Tipping Points – important new research on roots of violence
…specific policy recommendations and more about ways of working – circuit breakers, faster feedback loops, multiple parallel experiments and learning to fail faster (see previous post). It might also be…
Are aid workers living a lie? And does it matter?
…an eventual permanent solution because solutions generate new problems; and therefore no way of determining the quantity and type of resources needed. Governments fail to achieve results because they insist…
Building accountability in Tanzania: applying an evolutionary/venture capitalist theory of change
…more like a venture capitalist backing ten start-up firms knowing that most will fail, but some will win big. This has been possible partly because DFID has been willing to…
Going legitimate? Tackling migration scams in Bangladesh
…is resolved, it will fail to yield the positive impacts the civil society coalition had envisioned. As is often the case, vested elite interests – in this case several powerful…
3 crystal ball overviews on global security – not looking good
…the taboo on discussing limits to growth if we fail to find a technological magic bullet in time). For a non-spook thinktank version, there’s IPPR’s, sorry, ippr ’s (isn’t it…
Breaking the Class Ceiling
…of affirmative action has largely failed. This in turn is I think because India remains a deeply unequal country, and one that has largely failed to put in place the…
Why Positive Deviance could be the answer to working in complex, messy places like Papua New Guinea
…entirely. Accept that whether on health, education, nutrition or governance, there is a wide spectrum of success and failure in what is already happening in PNG. So study that spectrum,…
The Chinese in Africa – is there a backlash?
…tries to make a virtue of it. Africans are less and less convinced. Relations get especially tricky for the Chinese when strongmen fail to maintain stability.” China is not standing…
‘Odd but Interesting’: Clare Short reviews How Change Happens
…decide what action to take and, finally, power that gives domination over others. And again he cautions that many non-governmental organisations and faith organisations over-invest in individual empowerment and fail…