Duncan Green's Blog, page 5

Links I Liked

When you die unexpectedly. Early example of texting from a British churchyard ht No Context Brits WHO to assess new highly mutated Covid-19 variant as countries ramp up health checks. More evidence, as if it were needed, that turning poor countries into a giant Covid petri dish by ignoring vaccine equity is going to rebound […]

Development Nutshell: round-up (20m) of FP2P posts, w/b 15th and 22nd November

30 years and counting: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence in our COVID-19 world

Amina Hersi, Charlotte Becker and Florence Ogola introduce Oxfam’s new paper on the ‘dual crises’ of Covid and GBV. First published on the Oxfam International blog. Women, girls, trans and non-binary people have always faced the horrific and sometimes lethal consequences of gender-based violence in our societies, throughout history, in all countries, and in all […]

How do you Measure the Impact of Influencing (and ask some v useful questions en route)?

MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning) is a lot more interesting than it sounds. Done badly, it can amount to little more than bean-counting to satisfy the donor, of little value to the actual programme or people who are supposed to benefit. But done well, it raises all sorts of really important questions about how the […]

The Changing Face of Aid

The World Bank just released a monster number crunch on the changing face of aid. ‘A Changing Landscape: Trends in official financial flows and the aid architecture’ covers ‘all private and public sector financing to developing countries’ up to the end of 2019 (aka the eve of the pandemic). Here are the main findings, with […]

Making Change: What Works? Lessons from four successful movements

Making Change: What Works? is a smart new report from IPPR and the Runnymede Trust, drawing lessons from some of the most effective campaigns of recent years. Although it is UK focussed, there’s lots to chew on for activists everywhere. Here’s the exec sum, which mercifully, didn’t even need an edit. Movements change the world. […]

Links I Liked

COPping out. Not going to get into the ‘cup one fifth full/four fifth empty’ debate on Glasgow (oops, too late), but here are some other takes. My favourite placard was this quote from Chico Mendes, although ‘keep Glasgow cold’ came a close second (ht Nicholas Colloff) Alex Evans and George Monbiot set out the two […]

Getting into the Politics of why (some) Governance Programmes work

Laure-Hélène Piron and Sam Waldock reflect on some of the unexpected lessons of 20 years of UK-funded (total £276.5m) governance programmes in Nigeria. See the summary report and Duncan’s summary of the summary.  ODI/Learning, Evidence and Advocacy Partnership research found sustainable improvements in some dimensions of governance and service delivery in four Northern Nigerian states. […]

The climate movement we need right now

Alex Evans is one of the most thoughtful campaigners in the UK (see this FP2P review of his book, The Myth Gap). Here he is reflecting on the aftermath of the Glasgow climate summit on his Larger Us blog (I’ve made a few cuts to the original to get it a bit closer to blog […]

Links I Liked

First the unavoidable COP-out: Must be a metaphor for something, just can’t quite put my finger on it…. Superb backgrounder on the last (first?) 30 years of climate negotiations from Geoffrey Lean (whose twitter bio says he’s the ‘World’s longest-serving (50 yrs) environment journo’). Carbon inequality: in 2030 world’s richest 1% will have per capita […]