The Arab
street
revisited
Petra Stienen
Petra Stienen explores the role that youth, journalists and new technologies have played during the uprisings in Arab world in recent years.
Apparently
transparent
Does accountability deliver?
Rosemary McGee
Transparency and accountability initiatives aim to combat corruption and inefficiency, and improve how aid is channelled. How effective are these i...
Shaping
behaviour
How institutions evolve
Jim Woodhill
Development is about transforming institutions – the cultural values, legal frameworks, informal arrangements, market mechanisms and political proc...
The art of
framing
Pushing NGO interaction
Gisela Dütting, David Sogge
NGOs have been joining forces to increase their effectiveness. They need to form alliances with social movements as well, however, to avoid working...
SOC
Social Change
How social change processes can contribute to more just and sustainable societies
read more
The Broker sees social change as a complex series of processes in which politics, economics and culture determine how events unfold. An interdisciplinary analysis of such processes contributes to smart strategies for citizens, social movements and NGOs to achieve just societies.
Editor's blog
The changing face of citizen action
Maarten van den Berg | 05 September 2011
Coming up next week in The Hague, The Netherlands: a conference on the changing face of citizen action. read moreSpecial Report: Future Calling
Special Report: The future calling
March 09, 2012
read moreEditorial: Rooting INGOs in home soil
Frans Bieckmann | March 09, 2012
I recently chaired a forum that discussed whether a new paradigm has emerged in the field of development cooperation, and if so, what does it consist of?
read moreRetirement, replacement or rejuvenation?
Michael Edwards | March 13, 2012
The NGO community agrees that the foreign aid frame is no longer a viable option, even if that means that NGOs have to evolve into something else.
read moreThe road not taken
Ellen Lammers | March 09, 2012
INGOs are at a crossroads. Caught up in a tide of technocracy, they have become increasingly managerialist – ‘outsider’ experts disconnected from the real struggle.
read moreShedding the charity cloak
Evert-jan Quak | March 09, 2012
INGOs need to intensify their support to, or even become part of, global social movements if they want to introduce structural change.
read moreContributors to The Broker’s blog ‘Future Calling’
March 13, 2012
Contributors to The Broker’s blog ‘Future Calling’.
read moreEditor's pick
Winning hearts, changing mindsets
Jeroen de Lange | February 03, 2010
International development, humanitarian and military interventions aim to bring about change, but with mixed results. The fields of change management and complexity...
Complexity
Special Report: Changing the rules of the game
Frauke de Weijer | October 10, 2011
Implementing institutional change without a deeper understanding of the rules systems at its core is likely to fail. Policy makers need to acknowledge the...
Connecting the dots
Alan Fowler | April 07, 2008
ANP How are societies ‘developed’? For years, international aid has failed to provide a convincing answer.
Debating complexity
Willemijn Verkoren | July 28, 2008
In his article ‘Connecting the dots’ (The Broker 7), Alan Fowler presented complexity theory as a potential approach to development thinking.
Bucking the system
Bob Williams | December 02, 2008
Over the last 50 years the systems field has expanded to encompass more than 1,000 methodologies. In this article, Bob Williams describes three core concepts of systems thinking.
Interviews
Picking up the pieces
Anna Matveeva | October 10, 2011
Anna Matveeva talks to Dina Alborova about the difficult job of bridging the gap between ethnic Georgians and Ossetians following years of war and building peace in the region.
Transformative TV
Jacob Boersema | December 07, 2010
You can leave it to South Africans to combine popular media trends with long-term development needs – and make it a success. Last year, the first reality...
Featured blogs
Future Calling blog
Beyond the crystal ball
Remko Berkhout | 03 December 2011
What will our world look like in, say, twenty years from now, and what does that mean for the strategic choices that NGOs, INGOs and their partners should be making within the next few years? read more
Busan High Level Forum
People power for aid effectiveness
Hans Zomer | 17 October 2011
Effective aid work means enabling NGOs to bring about real, lasting change for poor people. read moreBusan High Level Forum
Local organizations are overlooked in aid effectiveness debate
Jennifer Lentfer | 05 October 2011
Are we overlooking the capacity of local NGOs? Jennifer Lentfer of how-matters.org argues that rather than being the lowest common denominator of international... read moreEngaging stakeholders for change
Increasingly, multi-stakeholder processes are being used in response to ‘tough’ problems such as responding to climate change, fighting poverty, and creation...
Civic driven change
Editorial: Connecting and catalyzing
Frans Bieckmann | October 07, 2008
Burkinabé writer and politician Joseph Ki-Zerbo said,‘On ne développe pas, on se développe’ (‘People aren’t developed; people develop themselves’).
read moreSpecial report: Deep democracy
October 07, 2008
People´s power
Willemijn Verkoren | December 02, 2008
In ‘Deep democracy’ (The Broker 10), a new approach to development – civic driven change (CDC) – was presented. The Broker asked people all over the world...
Featured authors
Jim Woodhill
Frauke de Weijer
Alan Fowler
Just published
Development INGOs
Michael Edwards | December 05, 2011
What is the right thing to do when you reach sixty? This is a question that many NGOs, which were founded in the burst of internationalism that followed the end...
Living analysis
Identifying obstacles
April 14, 2010
We need to expand our knowledge and use it in more context-specific analyses. The question is at what scale: national, regional or global?
Editorial: Living analysis
Frans Bieckmann | April 07, 2008
We’ve heard a lot about ‘Web 2.0’ lately, and now we’re starting to hear about ‘Science 2.0’. But what does ‘2.0’ actually mean? To me, ‘2.
read moreThe virtues of virtuality
Enrique Mendizabal, Stephen Yeo | June 30, 2010
Changing realities are causing some think tanks to consider reshaping themselves as ‘think nets’, which may be cheaper to run and more conducive to open innovation.