By Rahul Daswani The reason there are 9 “Major Groups” of stakeholders as part of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development is because these groups are the ones who are pushy and vocal. Felix Dodds (Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum), shared his tips during a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School on November 10 2011: [...]

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 Sherine Jayawickrama Following this blog’s last several posts on impact measurement (and the discussion that it helped engender), I came across an interesting advocacy toolkit on the iScale website that describes a system that combines planning, monitoring and evaluation – all focused on helping advocates learn and make corrections in realtime. The toolkit is quite [...]

By Jennifer Rubenstein This post is a response to the comments generated by Sherine Jayawickrama’s post on The Ethics of INGO Advocacy: Launching a Discussion.  Thanks so much for the contributions so far—I’m learning a lot from the conversation!  This comment responds briefly to a theme that has come up in several posts: the relationship [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama Several months ago, a provocatively titled academic paper caught my eye.  The Ethics of INGO Advocacy or Why It’s Okay that No One Elected Oxfam was authored by Jennifer Rubenstein, Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia.   Her presentation and the discussion that followed were interesting and lively.  Chatting with [...]

Peter Eigen, Founder of Transparency International from Hauser Center at Harvard on Vimeo. Interviewed by Balu Balasubramaniam, Mid-Career Fellow at the Hauser Center for the Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center

By Rahim Kanani The Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations hosted alumna Jo Luck HKSEE 1979, President of Heifer International, and her senior leadership team, at an event on February 4th where they engaged with students and faculty on issues ranging from climate change, to agriculture, to nonprofit management. [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama A couple of months ago, I blogged about how much NGOs have changed in terms of their readiness and their capacity to engage in the policy arena.  In that post, I cited NGO advocacy and campaigning at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh as an example.  The climate change summit that began today [...]

By Jonathan Scanlon I enjoyed reading Sherine Jayawickrama’s post on NGO advocacy at the G-20 a couple of weeks ago.  Her comments point to something that Oxfam America calls “smart development,” which is a key part of our current advocacy work on U.S. government development policy.  We believe that effective foreign aid can make a [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama The swarm of advocates and activists around meetings of the G-20 and G-8 have now become the norm.  As I follow the engagement of NGOs in Pittsburgh this week, however, I am struck by how much NGOs have evolved in the past decade. The Oxfams of the NGO world have long been [...]