This is the last of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs. By Keith Johnston Identifying and making decisions of global scope and significance is challenging for two related reasons. Compared with a national board, the issues become more abstract [...]

This is the fourth of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs. By Keith Johnston The central governance questions for any board are: What are we trying to become? Where are we going? These are the core questions for the [...]

This is the third of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs. By Keith Johnston A consistent endeavour is for each organisation to be more representative of the whole world in which it is working and to be able to [...]

By Elisa Peter Until recently, branding was a dirty word in many nonprofit organizations. Not anymore. Branding used to conjure up images of profit-driven marketing executives sitting in high-rise offices of the likes of Coca-Cola and MacDonald’s. The few nonprofits that adopted branding early on were suspected by others to compromise their ethical values and [...]

by Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation The 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held December 2011 in Busan, South Korea, was a landmark event where civil society participated in negotiations on the new direction for international development cooperation on an equal basis with governments and donors, [...]

By Sara Nadel This post was originally published on the Harvard Business School’s Managing Innovation Blog Several years ago, I saw a presentation by Yale School of Management Economics Professor Mushfiq Mobarak about encouraging poor populations in Bangladesh to adopt clean stoves. Traditional stoves pollute air inside the home, causing respiratory illnesses and increasing cancer [...]

By Nora McKeon Nothing unusual in the title of the seminar that The Hauser Center at Harvard University put together just over a year ago. Everyone from academics to NGOs, government officials and even rock stars seem to have something to say on the topic. The innovation here was the choice of the lead panelist: [...]

By Alexios Mantzarlis. The 17th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP17) is coming up, and no one harbors great hopes that the South African hosts will manage to cajole all major polluters into signing a legally-binding agreement to cut emissions. Civil society is rightly flummoxed at the [...]

By Elisa Peter The women are sitting in a circle on the ground under a tree. They were brought together by an international development NGO. An NGO staffer is facilitating the discussion and drawing lines on a large sheet of paper. This could be in Bangladesh, Mali or Peru. All of us working in international development [...]

The next session of the NGOs & Development study group, organized by the Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center, will be held on Thursday, April 8th from 4:00-5:00pm in Weil Town Hall (Belfer L1) at the Harvard Kennedy School.  The session will be lead by Shalaka Joshi, Vice President of Global Strategies, CSO Partners, and Salimah Samji, who was [...]