Aidnography

Hi all, In the first part of this week's review stories from the Gambia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria & Niger. We are also celebrating the history of #globaldev feat Robert Chambers! And there is dust in Cairo, 10,000 World Bank policy papers & AI racism in Brazil as well! My quotes of the week Nothing about this approach was new. So-called farmer-managed natural regeneration had been practiced around the world in dryland systems for centuries. It was essentially how farmers in Niger had operated before colonialism. Rinaudo sought only to re-popularize and promote it—to convince farmers to capitalize on the deep roots their ancestors had left, both literally and figuratively, in the land. (How farmers in Earth’s least developed country grew 200 million trees) Move away from a Eurocentric, White savior view of humanitarian interventions. View humanitarian functions as separate from the geopolitical hegemony of the Global North. Move away from the pretense of “apolitical” hum...

Hi all, An ethnography of bread in Jordan, co-designing algorithms, why UN staff accept precarious work conditions, Samir Amin, notes on a UNOPS scandal & expensive pre-Weddings in Zimbabwe-as always, an interesting mix of what 'development' means today awaits you this week! My quotes of the week Bread has undoubtedly been at the center of a wide array of contentious episodes in the Middle East. Yet in no instance was bread a passive symbol or facile evidence of anger, indignation, and rage. Insomuch as the hold that states have on us is shaped by our experience of particular governmental programs, the milieus within which citizens are formed will play a key role in determining how and when unrest forms. But to assume that hunger and deprivation, or the price of bread, are the straightforward drivers of dissent, obscures the complicated ways people encounter and respond to their historical emplacement. ( José Ciro Martínez, States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in C...

Business Week cover from 2005 on "Blogs will change your business" Mark Carrigan recently asked this question about personal academic blogs on the LSE Impact of Science blog and it inspired me to think a little bit more about the state of personal blogging in the international/global development arena. I share Mark's positive sentiments about blogging and it has guided my own writing experiences for more than a decade now: Blogging has been the central means through which I’ve developed a distinctive outlook as a researcher, providing me with an open-ended invitation to reflect on what I’ve been reading, analysing, organising and teaching. I’ve been doing it for so long that I find it hard to imagine what it would like to be an academic without a blog. As early as 2012 I started to reflect on the practice of blogging in the #globaldev arena: Development blogging-How to have fun, avoid disappointment & be a strategic writer , culminating in a post from 2018 about...

Hi all, A nice potpourri of #globaldev-related readings is served once again (before a short Easter break next week) & it takes from the Mount Kenya Safari Club in the 1960s to today's five-star hotels in Qatar, from Canada all across the globe to the courtrooms of the Pacific-and in-between we deconstruct discourses around 'adaptive management' + 'trust-based philanthropy'! My quote of the week One respondent in Les Cayes told us, “We don’t want to be made into victims for a sack of rice,” alluding to the fact that often the effort of knowing about, registering for, and accessing aid in Haiti’s south can be dangerous, degrading, and barely worth the goods provided – a bottle of oil here, a bag of rice there. (There’s a wide gap between aid’s promise and reality, Haitians say) Development news Haunting image of Kamloops residential school memorial named World Press Photo of the Year "I could almost hear the quietness in this photograph, a quiet moment of g...