Aidnography

Hello all! This week's links will take you on a virtual trip from Rio to Haiti, Palestine, Angola, Bangladesh and Guatemala. Topics include a great essay about Haiti's temporary camps, a theatre play that tries to engage with aid donors and critical reflections on EU bureaucracy's call for innovative projects, the 'failed states' index and the political economy of Nick Kristof's writing...plus a new Angolan-Chinese development dream (??), living ethnography and protesting against neo-liberal higher education 'reforms' in Guatemala. Enjoy! New on aidnography From the archives: Reflections on the original Rio Earth Summit 1992 As more and more snapshots from this year’s Rio+20 Summit arrived I did what any researcher/geek likes to do: I went to my nearest trusted academic library and browsed through some old books that were written shortly after the 1992 Rio Summit. Development “Waiting for Helicopters”? Cholera, Prejudice, and the Right to Water in H...

"The route is now marked out," Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said in a blunt farewell to an audience that included several of the 118 heads of state and government who had journeyed here. "Today we have agreed to hold to present levels the pollution we are guilty of. One day we will have to do better -- clean up the planet." " The function of the United Nations is not to mask general inaction with verbiage, speeches, reports and programs ," he said. I initially came across the quote in a book I recently re-discovered in the library. As more and more snapshots from this year’s Rio+20 Summit arrived I did what any researcher/geek likes to do: I went to my nearest trusted academic library and browsed through some old books that were written shortly after the 1992 Rio Summit. Global attention for sustainable development and networked governance The general tone was not surprising and is captured well by Ranee K.L. Panjabi: If Rio was largely an...

Hello all, A good week for interesting links, photos and documentaries! Football is about to start, so I suggest you just sit back, relax and scroll the links in the meantime! Enjoy! New on aidnography How peacebuilding has become a ritualised space-Summary of my PhD project To make rather unexciting PhD research a bit more exciting, there's already an interesting development since I published the post on Tuesday: The full version of the thesis is no longer available from the University of Sussex website and this is unlikely to change any time soon. One of the organisations from Germany is concerned with my research approach and I am currently working with the university on ways to keep the thesis accessible in the public domain. Development Nothing invokes the good old days of air travel like a PanAm Boeing 747 at JFK Airport...The year is 1973 amd 'volountourism' wasn't even invented yet ;)! Actually, there is a more appropriate reason why the picture and the lin...

After a long journey, I am finally able to share my doctoral thesis How peacebuilding has become a ritualised space- An aidnography from Germany and Nepal with you. In the unlikely event that you are not as excited as I still am and you don’t want to jump straight to the full 233 page document here [see 'Update' below], this post provides a more accessible overview. The post comes in three sections, starting with the brief abstract  of the project, followed by a short-ish summary of findings that you can also download here as a pdf file. Finally, there’s the table of contents as a teaser to what to expect should you add the thesis to your reading list. I also sent out a Thank You Email to many friends and colleagues who contributed information, advice and sometimes ‘just’ an open ear to the process and I’d like to extend those Thank You’s to the development blog community as well! If you have any questions, comments or require more reading ;) –just drop me a message!  ...

Hello all! With a slight delay this week's link review is a bit shorter and more 'conservative' than last week's, dare I say, more exciting one around the theme of stories and storytelling . Actually, this week's focus is on social media-and failing law schools-but the two are not really related... Enjoy! New on aidnography Development blogging-How to have fun, avoid disappointment & be a strategic writer Development Confusion and Delay (repost) There is nothing quite like being a parent. I have ridden motorcycles in shorts, sometimes with no helmet, and I have crashed twice – once into a BMW; I have traveled through war zones on two continents, and I have remained standing during a mortar attack; I have eaten “happy pizza” in Cambodia, drunk coca tea in Bolivia and been able to keep down fermented cow blood/milk/urine in Sudan; I have handled live cobras; I have been shot at; I have had the symptoms of both dengue fever and malaria; I once went for two weeks...

There have been a few interesting posts on the ‘how to’ (and why) of (development) blogging, e.g. by Chris Blattman , Joitske Hulsebosch , Duncan Green or Tyler Cowen ). The development ones tend to focus on important ‘housekeeping’ rules, but blogging is more than ‘don’t be snarky’ and ‘write about things you know and care’. I want to add a few more, let's call them, meta-points about development blogging that I have learned since I started blogging in the middle of 2010. Blogging is (still) responsive to agenda set elsewhere On most days and on most topics development blogging responds to something (conference, event) or someone (journalist getting something wrong). You can use it to your advantage and ‘join the debate’ but that also means you need to be prepared and respond in a timely manner. My posts on the initial Kony 2012 video , female bloggers or Charles Kenny's MBA contemplations were all responses wrote to enrich an ongoing debate. If taken at least half-ser...