Duncan Green's Blog, page 6

Development Nutshell: round-up (20m) of FP2P posts, w/b 1st November

What’s stopping aid from putting local people and organizations first? Answers from a global conversation

Guest post from Courtenay Cabot-Venton The world is currently at an inflection point that could enable the transformation of aid for developing countries. The convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the withdrawal of most international staff across the globe, has opened up space for more honest conversations […]

Twenty years of UK governance programmes in Nigeria: achievements, challenges, lessons and implications for future support

This detailed (113 page main report, plus annexes) ODI study by Laure-Hélène Piron, Clare Cummings, Gareth Williams, Helen Derbyshire and Sierd Hadley digs into one of those celebrity/Potemkin governance programmes that you keep coming across (and which I keep writing about on these pages). In this case a large UK investment in governance reforms in […]

Traditional approaches to aid and development are failing us. It’s time to invest in community-driven change.

By Mary A. Kabati, Ronah K. Lubinda, Adela Materu, Kingsley Makuwila, Jones Mwalwanda, Prosper Ndaiga and Moses Zulu If COVID-19 and the recent uprisings for racial justice around the world have made one thing clear, it is this: the global development sector needs to radically rebuild itself from the ground up. As leaders of community-based […]

Links I Liked

Pretty geeky collection of links this week, but then I know my audience…. Check out the FT 404 page. My fave: ‘Efficient Markets Hypothesis: If you had paid enough for the page, it would have appeared’. Ht Emma McGowan Bangladesh’s NGOs at 50: a thoughtful conversation between two real experts: David Lewis and Naomi Hossain […]

Development Nutshell: audio round-up (18m) of FP2P posts, w/b 25th October

Case Studies of sophisticated humanitarian influencing, based on a comprehensive context and power analysis – do they exist? If so, where are they?!

I’m doing some work for the UN, putting together a training package on ‘humanitarian influencing’. As you might expect, I’m advocating the use of PEA/context analysis, power analysis etc – see attached slides for my basic narrative. But when it comes to case studies, I am flummoxed. There are lots of examples in other bits […]

A Unique Fly-on-the-Wall Account of What’s Happening on the Ground in Myanmar

Regular FP2P readers will know by now that I’ve been following Myanmar quite a lot, and some of the conversations have been both interesting and of much broader relevance. Recently I had a call with some researchers who adapted their governance diaries work first to the pandemic, and then to the coup. Diaries involve local […]

Do you want to get serious about the Care Economy? If so, read this (and if not, why not?)

Amber Parkes, Anam Parvez Butt, Marion Sharples and Vivian Schwarz-Blum talks us through an important new advocacy tool – the Care Policy Scorecard Everything gets a rating these days: apps, hotels, Uber journeys. And everyone wants that five-star rating. But what about government policies that affect people’s lives? What if we could rate them too, […]

Want a secret sauce to increase the readership for your next book by a factor of at least 10? Here it is.

Finding myself having a repeat conversation with a number of different colleagues is usually a sign that a blogpost is warranted. In recent months I have had a series of chats with people either planning or already well into writing a book. The conversation usually goes something like this: Me: have you thought about Open […]