Words Matter: Ditching the Outdated and Patronising “Aid” Narrative
As Southern countries discover a bolder voice on the global stage, they are demanding more respectful relationships and less patronising language to accompany the shifting sands of global power.
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Is investing in a global public the future of aid?
The Covid-19 crisis requires a huge and urgent response to save lives and to help billions of people out of economic hardship. But it changes nothing in terms of what the world needs in the long term.
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Enabling policy, empowering communities: on local data for the Sustainable Development Goals
If you have been following the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) process, you’ll know the numbers. 17 SDGs, 169 targets, and 230 indicators. One question naturally arises: How the hell are countries going to monitor them all?
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From aid to Global Public Investment: an evolution in international co-operation
This blog is part of an ongoing series evaluating various facets of Development in Transition. The 2019 “Perspectives on Global Development” on “Rethinking Development Strategies” will add to this discussion
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Data, centralized: The UN as standard-bearer for a new era of data
Has there ever been a time when institutions were trusted so little? Certainly not in my lifetime. People have never been naïve, but confidence in governments and the media, and even now in businesses and NGOs (which have traditionally been most trusted) has been on...
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Balancing Scope with Accountability: A Challenge for Development Effectiveness
Back in the early years of this century, a phrase started circulating which has since become one of those constant pieces of development jargon. Rather than just calling for more aid, campaigners and recipient governments started insisting that it be better aid as well.
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Marvin and the American dream
I went to the US Embassy Independence Day party yesterday (celebrated a day early) – the huge military compound was transformed into a theme park for the night. The Colombian guests sang their national anthem with gusto, but the Americans gave a pretty poor rendition...
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Development at what cost?
What if the pledge to ‘leave no one behind’ were interpreted as a radical re-vindication – not just of equality, but also of individual human rights? In the run up to 2015, while many campaigned on which critical issues would become ‘goals’ and ‘targets’, and...
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Sexual harassment in the INGO sector
I wrote this last October for the Guardian but it wasn't published in the end (combination of me not being sure of myself and them having other content). Out of date, I would say it differently now, and there may well be bits people want...
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The poverty trap in an era of inequality
If you are caught in a trap it means you can’t get out until someone lets you out. When people talk about a ‘poverty trap’ that is what they mean. In the pre-Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era, culminating in the Millennium Development Goals, the focus...
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Beneficiary engagement in the SDG era
The international community now agrees that successful aid intervention requires the involvement of communities and beneficiaries in the decision-making process. But what should this involvement look like, and how can it be achieved?
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What is Development Cooperation? Four criteria to help define it.
As the world constructs the next phase of development and poverty reduction, Jonathan Glennie and José Antonio Alonso propose four criteria to help to define what should be considered development cooperation based on their new report for the UN’s Development Cooperation Forum.
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‘The Donors’ Dilemma’ – A Manifesto for International Public Finance in the 21st Century
This column by Jonathan Glennie is part of Global Policy’s e-book, ‘The Donors’ Dilemma: Emergence, Convergence and the Future of Aid’, edited by Andy Sumner. Contributions from academics and practitioners will be serialised on Global Policy until the e-book’s release in the first quarter of...
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As the cuts bite, why bother with the global South?
The Internationalists blogging series has been timed to mark NI's 40th anniversary. Read the other blogs exploring perspectives on development and global solidarity. The twentieth century saw great strides for internationalism. Colonialism became history faster than the colonists ever imagined, and a communications revolution made...
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We must rethink the role of aid for a new era
The nature of international development co-operation is changing, fast. It’s time for us to think more about how traditional “aid,” or official development assistance, fits into the new landscape. Countries that recently reached middle-income status are taking center stage, providing “horizontal” or “South-South” co-operation with...
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Use the economic crisis to reduce aid dependence
In the economic turmoil currently affecting the industrialised world, the arguments I set out in my book, The Trouble with Aid, become even more pertinent. As donor governments look for ways to cut expenditure on non-priority activities, some campaigners will shift away from a call...
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Jonathan Glennie takes on both the aid optimists and the pessimists
I knew this would happen. The intellectual initiative on African development seized by a free-market ideologue, now listed by Time Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
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NGOs: on the wrong side of Paris?
The Colombian government appears to have found a new policy document of choice. Rather than arriving at donor-recipient meetings armed with the latest dossier of stats showing how dreamily everything is going, government officials now turn up brandishing the Paris Declaration.
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Winds of change in Latin America
I have re-found an article I wrote a couple of years ago for the BOND newsletter - here it is below. In it I exhort the western development community (the main readers of the newsletter) to 'catch up' with movements in the south, particularly South...
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Professor Mugambi and the curse of climate change
If other Christian Aid reports are as good as mine the organization regularly produces high-quality pieces of work that both inform and persuade those that read them. It needs to translate them into all known languages (including both traditions of Cornish) and litter the world...
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The myth of charity
The now-developed world has spent much of its energy in the last few hundred years ripping off today’s poorer countries. Most Mexicans I know are well aware of this, while at the same time despising their own political elite for doing the same. That the...
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My view (in Mexico City)
As I sit writing this in my 12th floor office a gentle orange brightens the far horizon and I can see the mountains eerily outlined in the evening haze. This is one of modern life’s most unique phenomena, the pollution sunset. Perhaps the Kinks should...
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The right to water
Ironically, it almost rained. I have been here over a month and it has not rained once, but on the day thousands marched through the streets of Mexico City chanting “Water is life” and “Water is a right not a commodity”, I felt the first...
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Liberalism or liberation
The Diego Rivera murals in the Palacio de Gobierno in the old centre of Mexico City are incredible and moving. They chart the history of the Mexican people before during and after the Spanish conquest. You could spend hours poring over them. The thing that...
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Guitars and development
“Jimmy joined the army ‘cos he had no place to go. Ain’t nobody hiring round here since all the jobs went down to Mexico.” So says Steve Earle in a song I like. It’s a common theme – everyone knows that cheap Mexican labour is...
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Feeling insecure
Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq made the UK less safe. It was painful to watch him and his team try to persuade us in July that it was simply coincidence that the UK had been hit by a terrorist attack and...
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A walk in the park
Am writing this at 4am. Foolishly stayed up late on first night here as got hooked on Silence of the Lambs on hotel room TV – wanted to see favourite scene (“It places the lotion in the basket”) and thus sacrificed an extra day to...
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