There is a dark tension at the heart of development-oriented crop and soil science. It pits systematic research, respect for evidence, and incremental improvement, against the imperative to construct and claim success and impact ‘at scale’. This tension can be analysed from a political...
It does seem rather obvious now when we look back at the successful completion of the Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) Research Programme Consortium that achieving an effective and useful research consortium means that the consortium should be led by a Southern...
Around the world, practitioners and scholars are claiming that democracy is “in crisis”. The closing of civic spaces and the rise of populist practices that question established democracies increasingly feel like challenges to our ideals of development. These changes are something...
The Uganda team for the Pandemic Preparedness project have also begun their fieldwork stage with some exciting developments in their work. The team have begun researching the study site and finding people to participate in the study and seeking their consent. The fieldwork area is a mountainous...
The Pandemic Preparedness project has begun the fieldwork stage with some important developments in our work, starting with building key relationships in the community. This begins with the chiefs. Chiefs make up the bottom level of government in provincial Sierra Leone. Each chiefdom...
Seven years ago, Mali came into the spotlight as violence broke out following an attempt by armed groups to seize control of the North of the country and a military coup . While democracy was returned one year later, instability remains. Since then, Mali has consistently commanded international...
The UK policy network that responded to the Ebola crisis which struck West Africa between 2013-16 far from being one cohesive community of experts and government officials may have been three competing groups. Despite successfully increasing political commitment to the social response to the...