Duncan Green's Blog, page 2

What Heather Marquette is reading on Corruption, Crime & Conflict

Heather Marquette (occasional contributor to this blog) has started a new newsletter drawing on her work for SOC ACE – the Serious Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Evidence programme (and sister programme to SOAS ACE and Global Integrity ACE) and lots more on corruption, organised crime, conflict, security, foreign policy and development.. The first two editions dropped this week, and […]

Links I Liked

St George testing the dragon for Covid ht @ArtMemeLord Deaths vs. The Economy: An Unexpected Reversal. ‘assume that you do not know anything about how different countries have handled the pandemic so far and are given the following exam questions: there is a very rich country with a democratic government, and there is a significantly […]

Development Nutshell: round-up (21m) of FP2P posts, w/b 17th January

and I’ve just noticed that I forgot to crosspost last week’s round-up from my podcast to here. Sorry about that, and if you have time to catch up, here it is:

Deconstructing this year’s Oxfam Davos report – what makes it so good?

I know this is the week of Blue Monday, when we are all supposed to feel at our most miserable, but I’m not feeling it – this is the time of year when I am proudest of working for Oxfam, because of its annual Davos report. For several years now, this has focussed on inequality, […]

Being a feminist academic in Pakistan, and why Open Access is necessary for decolonizing Academia. An interview with Ayesha Khan.

I sat down recently with Ayesha Khan, who works with the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi, Pakistan. She is author of The Women’s Movement in Pakistan: Activism, Islam and Democracy (2018). Her FP2P post on that book is here. Here’s the podcast and below, a partial transcript. Enjoy. AK: Most of my professional […]

Davos, Inequality and Covid: Oxfam on Beating back the Billionaire Variant

It’s Davos time again, and here’s Oxfam’s Anthony Kamande introducing it’s latest blockbuster report. This post was first published on the Equals blog. In the informal settlement area of Kawangware in Nairobi, my good friend Joe is quarantining in his small room after contracting COVID-19, for the second time now. He is a nurse in […]

Links I Liked

Academic Publishers, nailed. ht Pierre Lindenbaum Why the military intervene in African democracies. Often not just unrest but the last of ‘four stages of the autocratic regime cycle’. The removal of Al-Bashir, Mugabe etc ‘rather than a direct consequence of mass protests and economic downturns, was the culmination of ripened factionalism’. Interesting pattern-spotting from Andrea […]

Who is helping protest movements engage with Policy Makers (and is that a good idea)?

A researcher got in touch this week to interview me for a scoping study for a funder that wants ‘to explore whether and how philanthropic actors can support movements as they move from political disruption to shaping political processes and outcomes… to identify gaps, and ultimately, to design a programme that complements existing projects.’ Firstly, […]

How to Monitor Political Context – some practical advice

I’ve been chatting to Johan Eldebo at World Vision about its work on adaptive management/systems thinking. WV is the 1000lb gorilla of INGOs – four times bigger in terms of income than Oxfam, last time I looked, and does some really interesting thinking in this area, especially in humanitarian response, where things are often chaotic […]

What does Governance look like ‘from below’?: great methodology; snappy format; fascinating findings; exemplary writing – please read.

The Action for Empowerment and Accountability research programme (covered regularly on this blog) is drawing to a close in a welter of research papers summarizing their findings. I was particularly taken with the one from the ‘Governance at the Margins’ team, both because of the format and the content. Here’s the link (sorry, forgot it […]