Featured image for “Who wants to be a trillionaire? How Oxfam worked out five men could win the ultimate wealth prize”

Who wants to be a trillionaire? How Oxfam worked out five men could win the ultimate wealth prize

January 21, 2025
Alex Maitland takes us through the number-crunching behind the headline prediction from this year’s Davos report: that there will be five trillionaires within a decade.
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Featured image for “Get ready for the new trillionaire class: whose wealth will be built not on merit but inheritance, monopoly – and the legacy of colonialism”

Get ready for the new trillionaire class: whose wealth will be built not on merit but inheritance, monopoly – and the legacy of colonialism

January 20, 2025
The world looks set to see five trillionaires by the end of the decade — and more billionaires are now being created through inheritance than entrepreneurialism. Anjela Taneja and Harry Bignell introduce Oxfam’s 2025 Davos report, which reveals the scale of unearned wealth — and how those riches are built on a colonial legacy of exploitative global systems.
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Want a bit of development-related festive cheer? Bookmark my new advent calendar

December 10, 2024
Shruti Patel shares her new advent calendar of success stories.
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Featured image for “Why is inequality so sticky? The political obstacles to a fairer economy”

Why is inequality so sticky? The political obstacles to a fairer economy

June 6, 2024
Theory tells us that democracies should become more equal. So why are they still so unequal? Gideon Coolin, Emanuele Sapienza, and Andy Sumner on their new UNDP paper that unpicks the politics of inequality.
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What’s special about feminist research?

November 19, 2019
In this blog, Caroline Sweetman, editor of G&D, writes about the shared political project that underpins the feminist research agenda.
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How feminist research can help confront the climate crisis

November 11, 2019
As the impacts of global heating are already being felt and we are warned of the irreversible impacts, Maria Tanyag (@maria_tanyag) reflects on how an intersectional lens, an ethics of care, and women’s situated knowledge will increasingly prove to be key and advantageous tools for confronting the climate crisis. Maria Tanyag is a Lecturer at the Department of International Relations, Coral
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The ‘NGO-ization’ of research: what are the risks?

November 1, 2019
Pierre Basimise Ngalishi Kanyegere is a researcher for the Land Rush project and an IT technician at ISDR-BUKAVU. This piece is part of the new “Bukavu Series” blog posts by the GIC Network. In the DRC, academic research is very often conducted within the framework of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These organizations commission research to support their activities. One might call such a shift
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What are the downsides for Southern Scholars of Open Access to academic journals?

September 23, 2019
Duncan Green and Maria Faciolince consult #PowerShifts authors on how to try and sort out an unintended consequence of Open Access. For several years, there has been a push to make academic journals Open Access for readers, and Duncan’s been a big supporter. OA is a good thing in terms of allowing readers, North and South, to get access to
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Why trust and intimacy are vital resources in research

September 12, 2019
Sandrine N’simire is a researcher at the Centre for Public Authority and International Development at the LSE. She discusses the challenge of building trust between researchers and respondents during research in Goma, DRC, and the eventual benefits from approaches that embrace trial and error.This post forms part of a series exploring Going Against the Flow, an ongoing project on water governance
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The “local” researcher – merely a data collector?

August 20, 2019
In this post, Stanislas Bisimwa Baganda writes about imbalanced power relations in field research, which can not only have negative impacts on the quality of work, but endanger the lives of local research assistants. He is a researcher in the Groupe d’Etude sur le Conflit et la Sécurité Humaine (GEC-SH) and a consultant in project management. This piece is part
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Featured image for “5 Top Tips for Designing Research to change Social Norms on Gender (or anything else)”

5 Top Tips for Designing Research to change Social Norms on Gender (or anything else)

August 7, 2019
Anam Parvez Butt is a Gender Justice Research Lead in the research team at Oxfam GB. Gopika Bashi is the Asia Campaigner for the Enough Campaign at Oxfam International. As researchers and campaigners in development organisations we constantly grapple with the question of how to design research that is useful to influencing change. At Oxfam, we’ve been thinking a lot
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“Waiting for the morning birds”: researcher trauma in dangerous places

July 9, 2019
Thamani Mwaka Précieux is a researcher with Land Rush at the Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural of Bukavu. This piece is part of the new “Bukavu Series” blog posts by the GIC Network.  Doing research in the DRC is a dangerous job, due to widespread insecurity in various parts of the country, and complicated by the presence of multiple armed groups. This
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