The messages emerging from people dealing with the Ebola outbreak on the ground in west Africa are becoming more hair-raising by the day. Here's the World...
Alex Evans
Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017).
He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development.
Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.
But tell us what you really think
Disproving my belief that official think tank feeds rarely say much of interest, here's a special moment on Twitter earlier today from the Center for...
Why the multilateral system is stumbling on conflict prevention
Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, South Sudan - not to mention Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Gaza, or Somalia. None of them is exactly a poster child for the...
Data revolution, meet deforestation
You will need: Some satellites. Google Maps. Trees. People. Some money. Method: Grab satellite data on forest cover. Make it super hi-resolution - all the...
No SDGs for you, North Korea! (updated)
Gird your loins: the zero draft of the UN Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals is out! While most post-2015ers will have raced ahead to see...
What’s wrong with development agencies
Here's John Kay, writing about the corporate cultures of Oxford University and the Co-operative Bank in the UK - but his description also applies 100% to more...
Playing with fire in the Ukraine
Back in 1989, William Lind was one of the team that first coined the term 'fourth generation warfare' - referring to low-intensity conflicts involving highly...
Goodbye to all that
Yesterday's findings from two scientific teams that a large section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has now started to collapse (almost certainly unstoppably,...
Climate tipping points – a quick guide
It looks like we’re already over two key climate tipping points. What about the rest?
OECD DAC Chair Erik Solheim replies on ODA to least developed countries
A couple of days ago, I argued in a post here that while it was welcome that aid flows had reached a new all-time high in 2013, it was bad news that aid was...
Surprise! Aid flows are at a new all time high
So here's a big surprise. Until last year, global aid flows were declining in the wake of the financial crisis - a trend that was widely expected to continue....
No diplomats, thanks
Anyone who's spent much time around UN headquarters in New York will know that the one ATM within walking distance of the UN is in the UN Plaza branch of JP...
Quadruple or Quits – managing the links between the four 2015 agendas of trade, climate, SDGs, and finance for development
Talk given by Alex Evans to a UK government cross-Whitehall session on the four key multilateral processes culminating in 2015: trade, climate, Sustainable...
Could Iceland actually be any more progressive?
Remember how Iceland got flattened by the financial crisis? How, as an IMF official put it to Michael Lewis at the time, "You have to understand,...
Rising incomes in the developing world do not a new age of equality make
Last week saw Oxfam's big new report on inequality, timed to coincide with WEF in Davos, garnering a huge amount of attention in the media - even attaining a...
It’s developed country, not emerging economy, attitudes that are the problem on sustainability
One of the best sets of data available on attitudes to sustainability around the world is the ‘Greendex’ produced by the polling company Globescan for...
I ? Vaclav Smil
Vaclav Smil is Bill Gates' favourite author, and he's interviewed in this month's Wired. The whole thing's a treat, but I especially liked this passage:...
The new politics of time
Real terms median wages have been stagnating in developed countries since the mid-1970s, when - as David Schweickart notes in this terrific paper (h/t Casper...
Time-lapse film of the ‘cleanest, darkest skies on Earth’
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/83436955[/vimeo] Shot by Nicholas Buer in the Atacama region of Chile. Via Boing Boing & David Hodgson. Headphones and full screen...
John Maynard Keynes on the post-2015 agenda
In the same spirit of hopeful ideas for a new year as Ben's excellent post on inequality, herewith some musing of JM Keynes's about "economic possibilities...
More from Global Dashboard
Justice for All and the Economic Crisis
As COVID-19 plunges the world into its most serious economic crisis for a century, a surge in demand for justice is inevitable. Businesses face bankruptcy – and whole industries may be insolvent. Similar pain is being felt in the public and non-profit sectors....
Effective Activism in a Time of Coronavirus: what are we learning six months in?
Nothing I’ve read has captured our times and our task better than this essay from Western States Center ED Eric K. Ward: “leading in easy times is, well, easy. But these times are not them”. Leading in difficult times is unbelievably hard, but we will all be...
Who Speaks for the Global South Recipients of Aid?
The murder of George Floyd and the resurfacing of the Black Lives Matter movement has led to heightened discussions on race in the international development sector. Aid practitioners in the North have not only condemned the systemic racism that they (suddenly) now see...