Advocacy

This comment first appeared in The Guardian on 25 April 2013

The panel established by the Secretary General of the United Nations to determine a new global approach to international development has concluded that peacebuilding is a central part of that new vision for human progress.

A UN Summit in September will review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. It will find that they are not going to be met by 2015 as planned. But rather than push for an “MDG Rescue Plan” as some are proposing, it is time to ask some hard questions about how societies change, and what we really mean by "development".

Full report

Last year International Alert’s Secretary-General Dan Smith was selected to review the UK Department for International Development’s policy on state-building and peacebuilding, an issue which is a bit of a hot topic in many of the countries where Alert works. Smith challenged some of the UK Government’s key assumptions and provided new ways of thinking about the interlinkages between state-building and peacebuilding.

Letter published in The Guardian on 5 June 2010

Andrew Mitchell, the new secretary of state for international development, has announced a new regime of transparency and accountability in how Britain's aid is spent. Welcome as that is, questions remain about what to measure, which means discussing the aims, and how to do it without distorting those aims.

Taken from Dan Smith’s blog, which can be found at www.dansmithsblog.com

It can be safely predicted that ideas and the terms of discussion about international development will change fundamentally in the coming five years.  A major policy statement from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) marks an important milestone on this road, though it’s a long way from being the endpoint. In this very long post, I explore the White Paper and a way of taking DFID’s logic forward.