Guest post from Fenella Porter, Oxfam’s Gender Policy Advisor In the small and rather quirky Chapel of the House of St. Barnabas in Soho, a group of UK civil society representatives gathered together to have a conversation about inequality. After having been in many discussions recently which have struggled to extend the understanding of inequality beyond wealth, what was interesting

This review first appeared in the June issue of the IMF’s Finance and Development magazine. I loved the premise and conclusions of William Easterly’s new book. The intervening 300 pages gave less cause for celebration. Easterly sees development as hijacked by technocrats: “The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a

Guest post from Paul O’Brien, Oxfam America’s Vice President for Policy and Campaigns  This blog will make more sense if you watch at least a few seconds of this Monty Python skit first.   Monty Python haunts me.  Too close to the bone if you work in a rights-based organization.   When I got into development work in the 1990’s, the UN