Summer reading

July 21, 2015 by kirstyevidence 5 Comments

I am currently making the most of my maternity leave by swanning around Europe in a campervan for 6 months. I have been thinking about a couple of new blogs which I will try to publish shortly – but luckily in the meantime, lots of other people are saying sensible things so I don’t have to. Here is a selection of things that have caught my eye in recent months….

I have been loving the output of Aidleap. They write about all sorts of development stuff including some great reflections on the evidence like this one on the poor state of development programme monitoring. I was also pleased to see this critique of the development sector’s obsession with innovation – and the hilarious accompanying tweet: “Donors talk about #Innovation like boys talk about sex – they’re incredibly excited about it but don’t know what they’re talking about”. It’s so true and it drives me crazy; who cares if something is innovative? We should care whether it works!

This is a picture of a mountain. It doesn’t have anything to do with this post but I think you will agree that it is rather nice.

Anyone in UK academia will be familiar with/traumatised by (delete as appropriate) REF impact case studies. I have blogged a lot in the past about the difficulties and potential dangers of assessing the impact of individual research projects and thus I loved this blog discussing why the REF case studies may not be a good reflection of policy impact of research.

This blog from the ever-sensible Michael Clemens tries to inject some objective evidence into the highly-charged discussions on migration. This guide to evaluation from the ODI RAPID gang does a great job of presenting a potentially difficult topic clearly. This blog from INASP about raising the profile of southern research is refreshingly practical.

And if you still have time for more, the Guardian’s new long-read section is fabulous and slightly addictive.