Upcoming Events

• Developmental Leadership Program event, Beyond the pandemic: learning from local leadership, will take place on 23 February 2021, 12.00 – 13.15 (GMT). Chaired by DLP Director, David Hudson, and in partnership with the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham, this event explores the lessons we can learn from emerging spaces of local leadership in the pandemic for tackling global challenges.

Publications

• Nic Cheeseman published The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa: Democracy, Voting and Virtue with Cambridge University Press, a book that shows how elections are shaped by competing visions of what it means to be a good leader, bureaucrat or citizen based on a mixed-methods study of elections in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. This radical new lens reveals that elections are the site of intense moral contestation, which helps to explain why the behaviour of those involved so frequently transgresses national law and international norms, as well as the ways in which such transgressions are evaluated and critiqued – so that despite the purported significance of ‘vote-buying’, the candidates that spend the most do not always win.
• Niheer Dasandi was one of the authors of the “The Lancet Countdown 2020 Report: Responding to Converging Crises”, 2021, The Lancet 397(10269): 129-170
• Niheer Dasandi (with Hilary Graham, Pete Lampard, and Slava Jankin Mikhaylov) “Engagement with Health in National Climate Change Commitments under the Paris Agreement: A Global Mixed-Methods Analysis of the Nationally Determined Contributions”, 2021, The Lancet Planetary Health 5(2): E93-E101.
• Niheer Dasandi (with Hilary Graham, Pete Lampard, and Slava Jankin Mikhaylov) “Intergovernmental Engagement on Health Impacts of Climate Change”, 2021, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 99(2): 102-111.
• Jonathan Fisher (with Cherry Leonardi) “Insecurity and the Invisible: The Challenge of Spiritual (In)Security”, Security Dialogue, Online First (Open Access).
• Dasandi, Niheer, Jonathan Fisher, David Hudson, and Jennifer vanHeerde-Hudson. “Human Rights Violations, Political Conditionality and Public Attitudes to Foreign Aid: Evidence from Survey Experiments“, 2021, Political Studies (OnlineFirst)
• David Hudson (with Cassilde Schwartz, Miranda Simon, and Shane D. Johnson) “Law Breaking and Law Bending: How International Migrants Negotiate with State Borders“, 2020, 2020, International Studies Quarterly. 
• David Hudson (with Jennifer Hudson, Paolo Morini, Harold Clarke, and Marianne C. Stewart) “Not one, but many “publics”: public engagement with global development in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States“, 2020, Development in Practice 30(6): 795-808.
•  Sanne Weber (with Siân Thomas) ‘Engaging in Gender-Based Violence Research: Adopting a Feminist and Participatory Perspective‘ in Understanding Gender-Based Violence: An Essential Textbook for Nurses, Healthcare Professionals and Social Workers, 2021, edited by Caroline Bradbury-Jones and Louise Isham. 

Other news 

• Martin Ottmann – together with his co-author Felix Haass – has won the 2019-2020 Quality of Government (QoG) Best Paper Award for their paper, “The Effect of Wartime Legacies on Electoral Mobilization after Civil War”. The prize includes an award of €400 and a visit to the Quality of Governance Institute (University of Gothenburg) for a week as guest scholars to present the paper.
• As part of an ongoing partnership between the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Developmental Leadership Program, and IDD, Nic Cheeseman and Rebecca Gordon launched a report on “Legislative Leadership in the time of COVID-19“, which includes a Legislative Responses to COVID-19 Tracker that captures the extent of legislative oversight over key policy decisions in 65 countries. There is also an accompanying blog outlining the main findings of the report.
• David Hudson is part of an ESRC Methods Grant as Co-I, led by Dr Cassilde Schwartz (RHUL) as the PI and Dr Miranda Simon (Essex), to develop a technique to evaluate the secondary effects of development interventions that flow through peoples’ social networks. These second order effects are missed by traditional RCTs that pay little attention to the spill overs for the wider community. The project will develop an online simulation tool (an ABM, essentially the same as the epidemiological models used to model the pandemic) that will model the flow of interventions across different kinds of contexts and settings and through different community structures. The project was one of twelve funded out of 163 proposals. The research will build on the MIGCHOICE project headed by Richard Black, which is examining how the impacts of a training and cash grant programme flows through would-be migrants’ networks.
• Paul Jackson (PI) and Sanne Weber’s research project on ‘Mapping Mental Health Resources for Young People Living in a Conflict Con-text at The Colombian Pacific Region’ started on 14^th February 2021. This is a Newton Fund research grant jointly supported by the Colombian Government and the ESRC.
• IDD is playing a leading role in the University of Birmingham’s Forum for Global Challenges. Fiona Nunan, as the Programme Lead, is overseeing the programme development for a major conference in 2022, and activities and dialogue in the lead-up. See https://community.forumforglobalchallenges.com/home for more information. Everyone is welcome to sign up to the Online Community and join in the discussions.
• Early findings from DLP’s latest portfolio of research on how leaders emerge, work together to push for change, and how this can be supported have been published on the DLP website. One project, exploring why women working in grassroots politics or development organisations are under-represented in state or national assemblies in Sri Lanka and Indonesia has nine key findings from interviews conducted in Medan, Indonesia (findings also available in Bahasa Indonesia). Another project, researching the impact of the Civic Champions leadership development program in Cambodia, finds that leaders employ different strategies such as delegation and perseverance and adapt practices for differ target groups to promote sanitation in their respective communes.
• Based on prior DLP research on political decision making, Jasmine Burnley published a DLP Opinion piece on the role of leadership, from both civilian government and the military, in Myanmar’s military coup. She argues that the power of individual leaders has been underestimated all along.