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Mali’s multi-layered conflicts cannot be understood from a single analytical perspective, it is not one conflict - but a dynamic system of conflicts.

Another Perspective is The Broker’s new blog. The title reflects The Broker’s ambition to look at globalization issues in different ways. Through this blog, we also keep our followers up to date on matters that concern us. The first blogpost will...

In response to Seth Kaplan: shifting from externally designed to local solutions, and from seeing poverty as isolated to the periphery to it being interconnected with the global economy and its inequalities.

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?

Today was the start of the final two weeks of the Bellagio Initiative. Forty people from across the world have been invited to the beautiful Lake Como in northern Italy to talk about how we can act more strategically towards achieving hu...

Today is a milestone for The Broker. We have just launched a new website and published the 25th issue of our magazine.

Social change

Humanitarianism today is faced with many challenges. On 2-5 June 2011, the Second World Conference on Humanitarian Studies (WCHS) brought together the best of thinkers and researchers to discuss urgent questions about the changing nature of curren...

There is an urgent need to develop new ways of using local knowledge and ideas, and bring them to a higher, politically relevant level.

The Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is like a Mecca for complexity science. Physicists, biologists, cosmologists, anthropologists, playwrights and even novelists spend their time here, breaking down disciplinary boundaries. This time the focus is...

Tomorrow morning I will board a flight to Santa Fe in New Mexico. I am expecting to land in a Wild West-style landscape, which seems to me particularly well suited for a conference on US foreign policy on Afghanistan. 'Foreign policy as a complex...

How can foreign policy today benefit from complexity sciences?

Rosario Leon's reflections on the work of CERES in promoting national identity cards to poor, rural indigenous communities in Bolivia is a vivid account of the political tensions and the emotional effects that accompany prosaic administrative enga...

I am a sociologist and the director of Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Economica y Social (CERES), a small Bolivian policy research institute. Like most such organizations, CERES has always been heavily dependent on aid. I have experienced and r...

Increasingly, multi-stakeholder processes are being used in response to ‘tough’ problems such as responding to climate change, fighting poverty, and creation of sustainable business models.

What role can civil society and (international) NGOs play in the rapidly changing global context? 

We need to expand our knowledge and use it in more context-specific analyses. The question is at what scale: national, regional or global? And how should we best develop a ‘diagnostics’ that can serve as a basis for specified (country or regional)...

International development, humanitarian and military interventions aim to bring about change, but with mixed results. The fields of change management and complexity science offer useful lessons for those engaged in poor and fragile states.

International missions that aim to support stability, peace- and state-building in crisis areas are often unsure of how to move forward. The idea is gaining ground that a ‘revisioning’ of such interventions is needed. Hybrid is the new buzzword.&n...;

Complexity approaches have a lot to offer the aid business, if it is not already too late. We asked Nils Boesen to comment on the blog postings from a recent conference.

The 'Innovation Dialogue on Being Strategic in the Face of Complexity', organized by Wageningen University and Research Centre, aims to explore what it means to 'be strategic in complex times'. The event, on November 30 and December 1 2009, brings...

‘We flew in a twin propeller plane over vertiginous snowy mountain ranges and landed in a fertile valley ... The airstrip, laid down by the Russians when they were here, is made of corrugated metal ... The whole plane vibrates to a stop’, writes C...

Development is mostly about transforming institutions – cultural values, legal frameworks, market mechanisms and political processes. If aid is failing, it is in part because agencies misunderstand institutions and how they change.

In his article ‘Connecting the dots’ (The Broker 7), Alan Fowler presented complexity theory as a potential approach to development thinking., one that integrates the ideas of Jeffrey Sachs, Roger Ridell, Paul Collier and William Easterly, to name...

How are societies ‘developed’? For years, international aid has failed to provide a convincing answer. This article offers a potential path to improving both aid performance and development in a broader sense.