Kuat Akizhanov presented the paper “Sustainable development goals and further embeddedness of the neoliberal socio-economic agenda in Kazakhstan” at the 2020 Graduate School of Public Policy Online Conference (Nazarbayev University). He also organised a Networking Conversation under the topic: “Distributional patterns in the era of finance capitalism: new research agenda for the Central Eurasia region” for the Central Eurasian Studies Society Week (October 12 – October 17, 2020, USA).

Nic Cheeseman and Heather Marquette were signatories to a letter published in the Financial Times this week expressing their concern at the apparent reluctance of the current UK government to uphold the Nolan Principles, the seven principles of public life established in 1995: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.

Nic Cheeseman (together with Gabrielle Lynch and Justin Willis) published The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa: Democracy, Voting, and Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Laurence Cooley’s article, “Census politics in Northern Ireland from the Good Friday Agreement to Brexit: Beyond the ‘sectarian headcount’?”, was published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.

Niheer Dasandi published “The 2020 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Responding to Converging Crises” in The Lancet in December 2020, and has been taking part in the various launch events for the report taking place globally.

Paul Jackson (PI) and Sanne Weber (Co-I) have been awarded a £297,476.00 UKRI/Colciencias grant for a project called ‘Mapping  Mental  Health  Resources  for  Young  People Living in a Conflict Context at The Colombian Pacific Region’. It’s a 3-year project, starting in February 2021, in collaboration with Sarah-Jane Fenton and researchers from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. 

News from the Developmental Leadership Program (DLP) Team:

The third iteration of the Developmental Leadership Program (DLP) was officially launched this week. Funded by the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade to a tune of £1.4m, the Program is led by David Hudson (Director) and Claire Mcloughlin (Deputy Director, Research) and will explore how leaders emerge, work together to push for change, and how this can be supported.

Claire Mcloughlin and David Hudson, with their Indonesian co-authors Anna Margret and Yolanda Pandjaitan, published a piece called Leadership, Identity and Performance: The Nature and Effect of ‘Prototypicality’ in Indonesia, in Politics and Governance. The article asks what makes a leader worthy of support, and uses novel survey and experimental data from Indonesia.  The results show that identity trumps performance for citizens perceptions of their political leaders. One interesting finding is that while many citizens say that gender doesn’t matter, the experimental data reveals that gender typically does matter. An implication being that leadership training could help leaders think about how they present or narrate their connection / identity with their followers.

Rebecca Gordon published  Transformative Grassroots Leadership: Understanding the Role of Rojiroti’s Women Leaders in Supporting Social Change, in the same issue. This article explores how women leaders in a grassroots microfinance organisation in India supported social change through building relationships and spaces for reflections in their groups and the wider community, suggesting that efforts to support women’s leadership need to align with efforts that ensure collaboration. 

The two articles are part of a special issue Leadership and Political Change in Asia-Pacific, edited by Claire, David, Chris Roche, and Nick Lemay-Hébert. A summary of the special issue is available here.

David Hudson published Navigating the dilemmas of politically smart, locally led development: the Pacific-based Green Growth Leaders’ Coalition in Third World Quarterly with Aidan Craney (La Trobe University). Using the example of the Pacific-based Green Growth Leaders’ Coalition, the article explores how politically tricky partnerships challenge tenets of local leadership and ownership. The IDD-led Developmental Leadership Program published a blog by Craney and Hudson summarising the key findings.

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