What’s Hot and What’s Not?Changes in development thinking in

the last 5 years

Duncan Green2013

Global Financial Crisis

Global Food Price Spikes

The Arab Spring

Climate Chaos

4 Trends in how we think about Development

• Changing understanding of Poverty• Rising importance of Inequality• Working in Complex Systems• Power and Theories of Change

What is Poverty?

Poverty and volatility

Implications for Aid & Development Agencies

• Change your metrics• Tackling hard core chronic poverty – disabled,

elderly, remote – needs different policies• Smoothing/avoiding/coping with Volatility is

more important than we thought• Resilience = the new fuzzword• Care economy (food price spike, financial

crisis)

Inequality

Globally, it’s the 2%

G20 doing badly

LICs doing better (on average)

‘The Palma’ v Gini: Birth of an Index?

• Ratio of income of top 10% to bottom 40%• Falling v Rising Palma index– X3 in reducing hunger and extreme poverty– X2 in progress on access to improved water– +30% in progress on U5MR

• Worth pursuing?

Implications for Aid & Development Agencies

• Gini or Palma?• Relationships, power and politics• Taxation/Domestic Resource Mobilization• Identify and target ratchet mechanisms

(hyperinflation, volatility, financial exclusion)• V tricky politics, esp for official agencies

Complex Systems v causal chains

Implications for Aid & Development Agencies

• ‘Whole of society’ interventions• Fast feedback and realtime data• Multiple experiments and rapid evolution• Measurement and Results for grown ups • Rules of thumb, not best practice & toolkits• Who to employ? Searchers not planners

The power and change cycle

Power Analysis

Change Hypothesis

Monitor, Learn, Adapt

Select Change Strategies

“In telling us what can be achieved byordinary people through organised

action, this book generates hope even as it enhances understanding of what

is involved in the removal of poverty.”Amartya Sen

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