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5 Things I learned about how to Communicate Research on Sustainability

resources? Julia Steinberger shares lessons learnt from communicating her research findings.

Earlier this year, my colleagues and I published an article entitled “A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries” in Nature Sustainability. In this article, we aimed to test the central idea of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics: is it possible for countries to achieve key social goals while maintaining levels of resource use that are not disruptive of key planetary processes? Depressingly, we found that no country currently achieves the majority of social thresholds without also transgressing multiple planetary boundaries.

Our article received a phenomenal level of public attention. In the weeks after its publication, over 100 news outlets ran stories featuring our results, we received significant attention on social media, and our website was visited by more than 23,000 people from 171 countries. Through this whirlwind experience, we gained some valuable insights into the challenges of communicating intertwined planetary and societal research. Distilled below are my ‘Top 5’ lessons for sustainability science communication.

Paint pretty pictures

Comprehensive, comparable data and robust analysis matter, but striking graphics are pure gold. My colleagues worked tirelessly to come up with the most intuitive ways of graphically communicating and summarising our results, and every minute and reconsideration paid off. Our results were instantly understood, through Twitter, our website and other formats. The fact that Kate Raworth had paved the way with her seminal diagram in Doughnut Economics also prepared our audience for this new kind of combination of sufficiency thresholds (above a certain level is good) and environmental limits (above a certain level is bad), where a good outcome is not an optimum, but a balancing act.

Stop searching for ‘El Dorado’

We must move away from existing economic models, and towards very different ones, changing economic structure and provisioning systems in the process. We must build El Dorado here, not copy it from elsewhere.

Most journalists, and many readers, really, really wanted us to provide an example of a country that leads the way, and seemed disappointed when we stuck to our result that there is currently no country that performs well both environmentally and socially. We were often asked about specific favourites (‘What about Cuba? What about Bhutan?’). The idea of an existing El Dorado, a golden mythical land, somewhere out there, represents a strong desire to find a role model to emulate, rather than adventure into uncharted waters. But our results (and those of many other studies) mean that we must do just that: move away from existing economic models, and towards very different ones, changing economic structure and provisioning systems in the process. We must build El Dorado here, not copy it from elsewhere.

Population growth remains an explosive topic

Population is still the third rail of environmental debates, with many commentators wanting to put the blame for our current conundrum square on the shoulders of the great human multitude. We agree that population growth should be reduced and reversed: this can happen rapidly by means of women’s education and emancipation. Not all populations are equally culpable, however: consumption differences across populations matter more.

Technology will not swoop in to save us

After the population-only problem, the technology-only solution is a frequent response. Imagination is often

Not politically neutral….

captured by one specific technology, which then becomes the desired answer. Such a perspective is dangerously reductionist, because it fails to take into account two central facts. The first is that consumption levels must go down overall: instead of ‘how’ we produce or consume, we should be focusing on ‘how much.’ The second is the problem of phasing out fossil fuel technologies. Dreaming about solar panels often comes at the expense of collective efforts to shut down old 20th century technologies. Technologies are not value-free or politically-neutral, and for better technologies (both environmentally and socially) to become dominant, we must engage in the intense political battles to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

Imagine frugal welfare

Finally, it is vital that we bring these topics and debates into the common discourse. Forty years after the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, we have made scientific progress in measurement and modelling of current challenges, but we still struggle to express what we must work towards. This can only be done effectively by articulating a position based on sound values and a shared radical vision: a vision where quality of life does not require excessive consumption, and where working toward each other’s benefit does not hinge on growth beyond planetary limits. Caring for each other, contrary to modern economic and policy orthodoxy, does not require economic growth. Put most simply, we need to learn how to prioritise each other’s welfare and build societies that achieve social thresholds, while reducing excessive consumption to be within planetary boundaries.

This article was first published on Oxfam’s Views and Voices blog

 

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Don’t worry. Be factful: Review of Factfulness, by Hans and Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

When Hans Rosling, the TED talk phenomenon and professor of international health, was a young doctor in Mozambique in the 1980’s he was berated by a visiting friend and medic for not providing better care for a seriously ill child that been brought into his health clinic. Hans provided the child with a feeding tube for oral rehydration, but his friend thought the baby deserved an intravenous drip, which would increase her chances of survival but take more time.

Hans reasoned that they couldn’t make that level of care standard treatment for the relatively small number of children who visited his district hospital, and with the time saved from treating patients at a ‘good enough’ level he could prevent many more of the 3,900 children expected to die in his district every year by training health workers, and vaccinating children. He describes this as the ‘cruel calculus of extreme poverty’, but in subsequent years he put his data-driven utilitarianism to work on identifying the many positive trends in the world.

Rosling’s book, Factfulness, published posthumously in collaboration with his son and daughter in law, sets out to prove to us that the world is getting better, and to try to explain why so many of us think the opposite. Whether you

are a development expert or an armchair pundit you will be confounded, and it is thrilling to have one’s assumptions challenged in Rosling’s company. Public audiences all over the world consistently overestimate poverty in the world (the majority of the world live in middle income countries), underestimate life expectancy (the global average is 72) and the number of children vaccinated (80%) and generally think the world is quantitively worse than the data indicates. He describes many reasons why our instincts steer us in a pessimistic direction – we separate the world into rich and poor, fear disaster, and generalise based on information that is nearly always outdated.

If you were around in the 1960’s you had empirical reasons to worry about a rapidly growing population, but childbirth rates slowed and then flatlined in subsequent decades, and in Rosling’s words we have now reached ‘peak child’ with the average birth rate being a little over two per mother. (The population will carry on growing as we have more adults)

Its disturbing to realise that the development sector reinforces some of the instincts he identifies as getting in the way of understanding the world better. Our expert papers may distinguish between low income, fragile and middle income states, but our public communication rarely escapes the rich world, poor world dichotomy… and we almost certainly aren’t sufficiently celebrating the progress that has been made on fighting extreme poverty.

But Rosling’s desire to tell a positive story also suffers from the pathology he ascribes to other – the tendency to believe in destiny. He clearly thinks progress on extreme poverty is inexorable because of economic growth and technological advances, despite many signs that it is changing shape and that progress is slowing – as India and China’s economic dynamism lift billions out of poverty, Nigeria and DRC become the poster children for accelerating poverty amidst growth, and poverty in a predatory state.

Rosling doesn’t wrestle with the rise in fragile states or human displacement, perhaps because it wouldn’t fit his meta-narrative that things were bad but are now getting better. At one point, he claims that there is no country in the world in which child mortality is increasing – and I was amazed when I tried to prove him wrong to find that even in Yemen, DRC, and Syria it is still improving. But the story on maternal mortality, (which he doesn’t feature), is grim and increasing in all of those states.

As Paul Collier points out in The Bottom Billion, there isn’t just dismal performance for the countries where the poorest live, but for those countries that have really fallen apart there is often no usable data. I’d add that even for those countries where there is good data, it doesn’t always tell us much about the quality of their development, like the Factfulness ‘democracy’ graph showing the rising share of humanity living in democracy, which doesn’t feel like a good guide to its health given the growing challenges to democratic norms and fair elections.

Rosling says that it makes him angry to be called an optimist, because that makes him sound naïve. But amongst over 80 graphs in the book none illustrates a negative trend, which suggests he was very comfortable being professor of the half-full glass. He is exceptionally good at it, and Factfulness will penetrate the hide of the most determined pessimist. It is the corrective we all need as we head off on holiday, listening to fake news, and melting under a raging climate.

Matthew Spencer is campaigns and policy director at Oxfam GB, @spencerthink

And here are the three authors, before Hans’ death

And just because it’s so brilliant, here’s a taste of Hans in his pomp: 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats

 

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The evidence suggests that support for UK development NGOs is actually growing

According to Dan Brockington and Nicola Banks, the evidence suggests that the demise of UK aid is greatly exaggerated. They want to know if they’ve missed something…

International development NGOs are facing interesting times in the UK. We live in a rising tide of nationalism, parochialism and suspicion of, not care for, distant strangers. Austerity measures make charities, and the giving public, poorer. And this was all before the safeguarding scandal put the entire sector on the back foot. The public mood appears more hostile to international development than ever.

At the risk of being heretical, we want to suggest that these threats may be exaggerated. Support for development NGOs is not merely resilient; it is growing. Entrepreneurial NGOs are creating new constituencies that champion new development causes. Far from being a sector under threat, we see a rich diversity of development NGOs flourishing in the UK, sustained by influential minorities.

These are the inescapable conclusions of our study of the changing fortunes of 898 development NGOs in England, Wales and Scotland as part of a collaborative project by the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, with considerable consultation across the sector. Here are four key findings from the main report, which we should bear in mind as we think through current challenges

1. There are more and more development NGOs. Numbers have been increasing, not decreasing over time. This is despite mergers and declines of a prominent few. There seems to be a sustained appetite for new organisations. Moreover newer organisations can grow quite quickly – age is no guarantee of size.

2. They are spending more and more money. Expenditure by these organisations has increased from just over £3.5 billion to over £5 billion per year by 2015, with scarcely a blip

Note: excludes STC International and the British Council for reasons we explain in the full report

3. The sector expands through entrepreneurship not cannibalism. Development NGOs are expanding in size and financial health by finding new sources of funds, not by stealing supporters from their colleagues. The increases in the number and budgets of the larger organisations cannot be explained by declines in other organisations. This means that these organisations are finding new sources of funding from new supporters, not raiding existing supporter bases. This in turn suggests that fundraising is really important for expansion. NGOs which sustain high expenditure almost all invest in fundraising.

4. This growth has been possible primarily through the generosity of the British public, which is by far the largest source of funds for the sector. It has given just under £10 billion from 2009-2014. It is currently the most important single source of funding, accounting for over 40% of income. The dominance of public giving is plain for all sizes of organisation. And, if that’s not enough, income from the public is increasing even as public disposable income falls as this article shows.

Source of income for NGOs of different size classes

The vigour of the sector puts a different gloss on current travails. It does not make the opposition any less painful or politically dangerous. We are particularly keenly aware of the challenges to the 0.7% commitment. But it does change the challenge facing development NGOs – for it means that the hostility of other elements of the British public is less financially threatening than is often assumed.

We know that overall, UK charities are not sustained by the general public as a whole. Rather, as John Mohan’s work has shown, the sector is primarily supported by a ‘civic core’ of about 31% of the nation which is responsible for 79% of giving and 87% of volunteering. Development NGOs appear to be a special instance of this bespoke supporter action. They may even have their own civic core, for while the rest of the charitable sector has been struggling in recent years, development organisations have been enjoying healthy growth. They are, relatively, austerity proof.

There is something rather remarkable about the development NGO sector as we have described it here. Even in the aftermath of the safeguarding scandal there is evidence to suggest that support for development NGOs has remained resilient. In an era of Brexit, growing insularism, anxiety about refugees and pressure on the Aid budget, the number of charities which work on famine relief and overseas poverty increases at double the rate of other charities. Perhaps this is not a sector which should be understood in terms of what average Britons think or believe, or even dominant political discourses. Perhaps this is the outpouring of a rather stronger vein of cosmopolitanism and concern for distant strangers that runs deep in such a significant minority of people that the creativity and resources of that minority are yet to be exhausted. Perhaps the sector, by virtue of its growth and vigour, creates the very markets and audiences that it seeks funding and support from.

These findings may surprise many colleagues are facing difficult fund-raising environments and hostile media. One of the reasons we have published this blog is that we want to ask ‘do they resonate with your experience’? We would love to hear your views as we pursue our next steps. On our part one challenge is that we cannot tell who this giving public is from current data, or how supporter constituencies are formed, and what conducive environments produce them. We want to understand who constitutes the giving public for development NGOs.

Development NGOs still face some of their most challenging times. There is good evidence that the consequences of episodes of hostility and opposition are felt many years in the future, not in the immediate aftermath. And a far more robust response to the safeguarding crisis is essential. But our point is not that these challenges do not exist, or are somehow irrelevant. Rather our research suggests that the sector can face them with a strong tail-wind of core believers who back them still.

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Links I Liked

Tips from DFID’s Chief Economist on how researchers can influence policy (podcast)

New Oxfam study of Pakistan’s World Bank Public Private Partnership (PPP) programme in education comes to pretty damning conclusions on exclusion, cherry picking best students, poor quality teaching and low teacher wages.

Analysis of four leading gender and politics journals found that less than 3% of articles were by writers in the Global South. Imagine what it would be for some other disciplines….

Love this McVities slogan in France – “It’s English, but it’s good!” ht Tom Moylan

10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English). Errrm, translated by the Guardian

Britain must sometimes support ‘unsavoury regimes’, according to new UK Government (FCO) report states. This looks like an important official rethink on the failures of liberal interventionism.

And one thing I learned about Irene Guijt on last week’s Tanzania research trip with her. She is disturbingly obsessed with goat videos. Here’s why:

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Of the World’s top 100 economic revenue collectors, 29 are states, 71 are corporates

figures. In the past, previous such lists offended purists because they compared apples (national GDP) with oranges (corporate revenue). This time the authors in their background paper say have tried to include only government revenue:

‘we compare the revenues of states (mainly taxes collected) with the revenues of corporations, as suggested by Jeffrey Harrod, who argued that we should see revenues (minus profits) as a “budget” of firms in analogy to governments.’

The table gives the source for those revenue figures as ‘CIA World Factbook 2017’. I’m no stats geek, but surely there are more accurate, up to date stats for government revenue – anyone care to check?

But in any case, it’s a step forward on GDP and offers a better taste of just how large the biggest transnationals have become, how their geographical mix is shifting, and raises questions about their power and ability to capture political processes. Headlines:

Of the top 100 revenue generators, 71 are corporations.
There are 14 Chinese firms in the top 100, but 27 from the US

More from the authors here

Here’s the table:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Update: I initially missed the shift from GDP to revenues – thanks to Liam and Euan for putting me straight.

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Of the World’s top 100 economic entities, 29 are states, 71 are corporates

figures. The list offends purists because it compares apples (national GDP) with oranges (corporate revenue), but I think it offers a taste of just how large the biggest transnationals have become, how their geographical mix is shifting, and raises questions about their power and ability to capture political processes. Headlines:

Of the top 100 revenue generators, 71 are corporations.
There are 14 Chinese firms in the top 100, but 27 from the US

More from the authors here

Here’s the table:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What restrains extreme violence – Culture or the Law?

norms

Do we need to get used to war? That’s the frightening question from the 2018 Armed Conflict Survey, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), launched with the blunt message that ‘peace processes are stalling… the number of armed groups is rising,’ and we’re facing ‘more drawn-out conflicts’ difficult to resolve.

Among other reasons, the IISS blames foreign intervention. In 2017, seventeen conflicts were subject to external meddling of one sort or another, considerably more than the eleven in 1997. With Russia bombing Deraa, and Saudi Arabia bombing Hudaydah, that trend doesn’t look like ending any time soon.

In a separate report this June, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) highlighted another reason. ‘Humanitarians, ‘ it said, ‘witnessed more armed groups emerge in the last seven years – than in the previous seven decades.’

But the vital thing about this ICRC study, The Roots of Restraint in War, is not that it adds to the literature on the proliferation of armed groups, and fragmentation of conflicts. It’s that it looks at how to limit the hideous human cost of conflicts – and perhaps more than the ICRC has ever before acknowledged, suggests that international humanitarian law (IHL) is not enough.

Based on research in South Sudan, Mali, Colombia, the Philippines, and with Australia’s armed forces, it asks what restrains fighters from committing atrocities – and finds that things are more complex than they seem.

In Mali, two groups, both linked to Al Qaeda, did not behave in the same way – one was significantly worse in using suicide bombers and sexual slavery. From this and other cases, the ICRC drew a wider lesson, that the decentralised armed groups that proliferate in modern conflicts may be open to influence from diverse external sources, such as community leaders – and that at least some of those external sources are restraining their violence.

This is important, but the real ‘take-away’ from this research, ICRC Vice-President Gilles Carbonnier told an audience at RUSI in London, is that the ICRC should broaden the way it tries to influence armed forces and armed groups’ behaviour. The ICRC is after all the guardian of international humanitarian law. Its usual message is ‘the power of law’, as its President Peter Maurer told the UN Human Rights Council last year. But it seems increasingly conscious that law, by itself, is not enough.

Years ago, in 2004, the ICRC’s earlier research, The Roots of Behaviour in War, showed that it’s not enough to spread knowledge of international humanitarian law. Since then, the ICRC’s increasingly focussed on the ‘formal socialisation’ of IHL through the doctrines and training of armed forces.

But what their new research suggests is that it’s far more informal things, like the peer pressure of other fighters or the sense of ‘who we are’, that is at least as important to influence whether combatants restrain violence or not. When a fighter is about to slaughter a child or civilian, the momentary thought that may stop him is not some basic knowledge of IHL; it’s that this is not what an ‘honourable warrior’ (in Islamic culture) or ‘a US Marine’ should do. It’s identity and cultural values – consistent with, but more emotionally powerful than, IHL.

So where does this leave the ICRC and its mission to uphold IHL? Carbonnier said that it must focus more on the

Anyone seen a lawyer?

‘informal socialisation’ of IHL, meaning highlighting the values and identities of communities, armed groups and societies that are consistent with IHL.  The Roots of Restraint study’s most important finding is this:

An exclusive focus on the law is not as effective at influencing behaviour as a combination of the law and the values underpinning it. Linking the law to local norms and values gives it greater traction. The role of law is vital in setting standards, but encouraging individuals to internalize the values it represents through socialization is a more durable way of promoting restraint.

Should other organisations draw similar conclusions? Oxfam, for instance, isn’t an agency rooted in IHL in the way that ICRC is, but it tends to highlight IHL in much of its advocacy on humanitarian crises. Other organisations, such as Geneva Call, seek to build non-state armed groups’ knowledge of IHL rules, and their capacities to implement them. Only this month, the UK parliamentary group on Yemen heard from a Yemeni women’s rights activist about women’s community-based organizations training Yemeni fighters in the rules of war, which had indeed had an impact on their behaviour.

But should Oxfam – like the ICRC – think beyond law? It condemns the never-ending killing, and calls on all parties to protect civilians through respecting IHL. Its latest briefing on Yemen calls for all parties to “respect international law and uphold the rules of war” – quite rightly of course. But Oxfam doesn’t talk so much about religious or cultural values that might restrain violence as well. That’s not necessarily easy to do. It requires knowledge of the local values and identities that warring parties and their combatants may hold. But it’s something that we all – not just the ICRC – may need to develop far more in the future.

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What does ‘going to scale’ mean in poor communities in South Africa?

Africa

Among development’s chattering classes, scale is a hot topic – what’s the point of supporting small pockets of progress, unless we can scale them up to the country/population at large? In the shanty towns of South Africa, we’ve seen our work go to scale, sometimes by intent, but often by accident. Both channels matter.

Last year IBP South Africa’s Jessica Taylor  collaborated with Shumani Luruli and Mike Makwela of local organisation Planact  and the Social Audit Network’s Thando Mhlanga on a sanitation social audit in the Wattville township east of Johannesburg in Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality. The project achieved significant results almost immediately when faulty portable toilets were improved and additional toilets delivered. You can view a short film about the audit here.

While many of our stakeholders were excited about the project for a short time, we almost immediately started getting questions about scale. After all a few extra toilets do not make a significant contribution to the massive challenge of ‘opening budgets to transform lives’ (IBP’s tag line) in South Africa.

In response to this (hopefully?) friendly criticism Jessica, Shumani, Mike, Thando and new IBP South Africa recruit Sfiso Mollo, scaled up our work in Ekurhuleni Metro significantly this year. The scaled up social audit covered the same service and the same sanitation contract; but this time involved 10 additional informal settlements across all five of the poorest parts of Ekurhuleni.

This scaled-up approach immediately bore fruit, with the Ekurhuleni supply chain management and water and sanitation departments now using the audit findings when they draft new sanitation contracts. Our social audit findings are now having an impact way beyond the sites that we actually audited.

The scale of the audit was also rewarded by the interest of the Auditor-General, who observed this scaled up social audit to see whether such information could inform risk assessments and assist in sampling processes in future across the whole of South Africa. We haven’t yet heard the result, but the impact could be huge.

To date, however, the biggest shift to scale has arguably not been what we included in the project plan, but what happened outside it. Informal settlements residents in Wattville (the site of the original audit last year) gained such confidence from the social audit that they continued to engage with government on their own account, using their new skills to access and engage with the necessary information from the municipal department of Human Settlements. They regularly visited the department for updates about plans, budgets and the development of a list of housing beneficiaries. This ultimately ensured that 148 families moved from their shacks into brick and mortar new homes just a year after the social audit took place.

It is important to note that these houses were delivered by a different department to the one engaged in the original social audit. This community therefore took the sense of empowerment that they developed around the sanitation social audit and engaged with the Department of Human Settlements. This is but one of many stories that we are hearing about how disempowered communities use the skills and the confidence that they gain during a social audit process to engage other parts of government. The Wattville community have also successfully engaged the national department of home affairs to register local residents for identity documents.

Amartya Sen beautifully captured the essence of development as the progressive expansion of the freedoms to be and to do. What we have seen in some of the most deprived places in South Africa, is that development at scale can be achieved deliberately, but can also come in unintended ways when a spark lights empowerment’s fire in the hearts of excluded communities and they take it from there.

And here’s that video again (8 minutes)

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How does DFID work with non-state power holders (armed groups, faith organizations, traditional chiefs) in messy places? Interview with Wilf Mwamba

Friday’s post) was hanging out with a true ‘development entrepreneur’, Wilf Mwamba. Wilf is a rising star in DFID, set up some of the most interesting ‘adaptive management’ programmes in Nigeria, and has been in the DRC for the last 18 months, as Team Leader for governance, conflict and humanitarian. Over a beer or three, Tom Kirk and I interviewed Wilf for our LSE research project on how donors understand and work with ‘public authority’ – power held by groups and individuals outside the formal state.

Here are some highlights. Wilf reckons this blog will probably be ‘career limiting’, and asked me to include a standard disclaimer from him: ‘These are my personal views and the opinions and ideas expressed here are absolutely my own, not those of my Employers.’ Got that, everybody?

Going beyond the state: Armed Groups

‘DFID has long been state-centric. These days, its building stability framework recognises that it has to think beyond the state. But in practice, this is hard. With militias and armed groups, the problem is mainly political – even if opposition armed group are locally legitimate, backing warlords is not UK policy! Also, DFID it not really equipped to engage these actors. Maybe the FCO or Stabilisation Unit guys working with or embedded in UN outfits are better placed.’

Beyond the state: Faith Organizations

Wilf was impassioned about the need for aid agencies to work better with faith organizations (might have something to do with having trained for 7 years to be a Catholic priest, before changing his mind).

‘We work with the Church in DRC, because they are a provider (often the main provider) of services like health and education. We also work with them on elections-focussed programmes involving church-backed groups concerned with social justice issues and service delivery (e.g. the Justice and Peace Commission).  It started happening out of necessity, rather than ideology, or due to their importance in our power analysis.

This is unusual in DFID. It is ‘unwritten’, but in most places we have stayed away from faith-based organizations. I think it was a cultural / intellectual thing, and to do with not taking sides in places where conflict and religion intersect (many staff have worked in such places, so bring those attitudes with them to the DRC).

In DRC, however, there is little religious conflict and Catholicism is dominant. Working with them is a necessity in many areas, as they are the de facto state.’

Sure you may be the Public Authority round here, but can you fill in a logframe?

Going beyond the state: Traditional Chiefs

‘There is a notion within DFID that traditional chiefs are part of the problem – they are seen as custodians of inequality, child marriage etc. Which is true in some places, but not universally. They are seen as a power that aid should help to destroy or make go away, a relic of past illiberality and underdevelopment.  In my experience, DFID doesn’t really talk about them much except to negotiate access to a given area or a section of their population.

But clearly you cannot ignore them, as they are often locally legitimate and they own the land. There is also an accountability structure under the chiefs, which mainly consists of the local elders. The elders can ‘impeach’ a chief if they like. So why do we not engage with them if that is how most people are governed and get some measure of social justice?

I would argue that DFID does not get the traditional system, not least because traditional leaders don’t speak the same ‘language’ (e.g. rights, development). They disagree with us in public on issues like social norms. In contrast, CSO leaders often speak DFID’s lingo of social justice and rights, making them part of a more relatable ‘elite’.’

What does the world look like to DFID?

‘Sometimes it can feel like we want everywhere to look like the West, and see anything non-Western as a threat, a risk, or just backward. I think like many other development organisations, DFID struggles with anything that does not fit its anglophone/European paradigm. So for example, it does not always ‘see’ chiefs for example, and when it does, it generalises them as ‘traditional authorities’ rather than trying to understand the institution in detail. Or it dismisses all of them as ‘co-opted’. But NGOs speak our language and don’t challenge DFID, so they’re OK.’

And for us as researchers, one final hopeful message: Wilf reckons that research plays an important role within DFID in legitimizing new practice.

 

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Links I Liked

How to do advocacy on/with the IMF.  Really useful (and short – 8 pages) guide from Eurodad

“Church and traditional leaders are your best allies to carry public health messages that require communities to change age-old habits and challenge their traditions.” Congo’s Health Minister reflects on the lessons of his country’s wonderful Ebola success.

My son Calum has written a smart blog on his work promoting Community Land Trusts in London.

Last instalment on the World Cup: How repressive states and governments use ‘sportswashing’ to remove stains on their reputation.

New Zealand has passed world-first legislation granting victims of domestic violence 10 days paid leave to allow them to leave their partners, find new homes and protect themselves and their children.

The UN’s human rights chief has had enough. Powerfully written tribute to Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, who steps down next month.

Trevor Noah remembers the first time he heard a joke as a kid, on an anti-apartheid march in S Africa with his grandad. And decided to become a comedian. Lovely story.

 

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