Duncan Green's Blog, page 8

Links I Liked

Extreme multi-stakeholder consultation… ht Richard Cunliffe The Data Manipulation Scandal that could topple the heads of the World Bank & IMF. Superb analysis of the Doing Business scandal by Justin Sandefur. Should be required reading for public policy/international development students. It also shows the extraordinary power of league tables in advocacy How to Destroy a […]

When the Room is Laughing: From Female Researcher to Prostitute Researcher

A last couple of posts in series from the Bukavu workshops on the realities of research in the DRCongo, this one by An Ansoms and Irene Bahati. Introduction to the Bukavu series here. Search on ‘Bukavu’ for the other posts in the series or see list at end of this piece. Original post here. Working in […]

Social protection and COVID-19 – the emerging story of what worked where… and what it all means for future crises

Throughout the pandemic, social protection practitioners have been drawing on past experience and established ‘mantras’ to support governments and emergency actors to respond to the crisis. Valentina Barca, the Team Lead for the FCDO-GIZ-DFAT-funded SPACE service shares reflections on whether and how these mantras have been taken up. COVID-19 caught us all by surprise. The social protection […]

Want some top brainfood? Check out the speakers for this year’s ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’

This year’s Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice series kicks off at the LSE this Friday – 1st October. After that it’s every Friday from 4-6pm UK time (except for reading week on 5th November, when we all have a lie down). So why not bunk off work a bit early and start […]

Links I Liked

UK migration policy co/ The New European Good early backgrounder on COP26 from CNN The online pile-on over the deeply naff and questionable CBS ‘reality’ TV show that pits activists against each other in an X-factor style piece of nonsense has triggered a rethink from the organizers and this fine set of alternative suggestions. The […]

Development Nutshell: me, talking you through FP2P posts, w/b 20th September (18m)

Book Review: From Anger to Action Inside the Global Movements for Social Justice, Peace, and a Sustainable Planet, by Harriet Lamb and Ben Jackson

I’ve come to recognize a certain format for ‘inspirational books for activists’: big sweeping statement about What Needs to Happen, then what I call ‘thousand points of light’ – breathless accounts of some activist-led efforts to achieve those goals. On to the call to arms, invoking political will. Job Done. I must be getting (even […]

The Top 10 unintended effects of international cooperation

What are the most prevalent unintended effects of international cooperation? Dirk Jan Koch, together with the Center for Global Challenges of Utrecht University, analyzed all project evaluations by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs since the turn of the century. Here’s the top 10. The figures in […]

India’s Schooling Crisis

Beyond excited to host a development hero, Jean Drèze, on the blog. He introduces some new research showing that in India, the prolonged closure of schools has taken a heavy toll. A sound strategy to deal with this crisis is nowhere in sight. Indian children have been “locked out” of school for almost a year […]

Links I Liked

The Flat Earth Society scores an own goal. ht Giles Paley-Phillips After huge controversy over fiddling the numbers to avoid antagonising powerful countries like China, the World Bank scrapped its Doing Business report. But even without the corruption, its methodology always felt dodgy – more ‘how much does country X resemble the American dream’, with […]