There is a very real possibility that the UK ceases to be a significant presence in international development over the next couple of years; indeed, this is the most likely outcome at present. In this note, we set out the challenges facing Mitchell, and how each of our recommendations can be achieve...

Pull financing is a powerful but underused mechanism for incentivising progress on hard-to-tackle social problems for which innovation or the take-up of innovation may be part of the solution. It should become part of the ongoing landscape for climate and development work. This paper sets out the sp...

As one of the only truly global institutions, the World Bank is uniquely positioned to be the world’s premier source funding for global public goods. But despite its global coverage, the World Bank has never truly been oriented towards global challenges. Its mission has been defined primarily by ind...

Many public organizations employ technologies of scrutiny such as peer review or quality assurance to improve their performance and decision-making. Such technologies may affect performance and decision-making directly, through scrutiny, and indirectly, through behavioural responses by agents within...

An increasing share of official development assistance is being used for climate-related activities. This trend is continuing despite the lack of comprehensive cost-effectiveness evidence to guide spending decisions and continuing concerns that few applications are effective or efficient mechanisms ...

Official development assistance (ODA) can be and often is spent in well-off countries, where a vanishingly small proportion of the population live in poverty (Dissanayake & Tahmasebi, 2021). Such spending is sometimes justified either on the grounds that a large number of the global poor neverth...

Official development assistance is supposed to be designed to prioritise the economic development and welfare of developing countries. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee is a club of wealthy donor countries which collaborate to set rules and norms to this effect.