Our Blogger Emeritus Duncan Green on a new guide that draws on work in the US to influence policy on tobacco and health to identify five roles for research in policy change.

FP2P’s Duncan Green has a shiny new blog about activism, influencing and change, hosted by the LSE, which we’ll be sharing highlights from here. You can also subscribe here. In this post from the new blog, he shares some advice from humanitarian leaders in this bleak time for the sector – including talk more often to staff and partners, “watch the fog closely” and “don’t blabber” – and offers a couple of thoughts of his own.

If you want to be rid of aid that advances US interests, don’t celebrate now: that aid isn’t going anywhere, says Terence Wood.

After months of futile and wearying paralysis, marked by interminable meetings full of little more than posturing and the endless repetition of fixed positions, the climate change talks seem to be entering full negotiating mode, and not before time, with the Copenhagen climate summit only 3 months away. For the ‘glass half full’ optimistic version, check out Leo Horn’s summary