Failure
Invention and Innovation
Vaclav Smil, prolific author of several best selling book, published “Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure” (2023) with MIT Press. The book presents a three-part approach to assessing invention and innovation, which examines: (1) inventions that works but we later learned caused harm – leaded gasoline, DDT, CFCs; (2) Inventions we […]
Tags: #Failure #Innovation #Invention #Invention and Innovation #Vaclav Smil
Letting them Die – Why Programs Fail
“In the old South Africa we killed people. Now we’re just letting them die.” – Pieter-Dirk Uys In her 2003 book, ‘Letting them Die’: Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Fail, Catherine Campbell describes how “the best-intentioned programmes, even when they achieve high levels of mobilization of the least-powerful sectors of small local communities, may have […]
Tags: #Failure #International development #Participation #social capital #Stakeholders
Descent into Chaos – Afghanistan
Reflections on international development from Ahmed Rashid’s award-winning 2008 book “Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.” For those interested in the region, or of military intervention in the era of the ‘war on terror’ this is essential reading. Proposals before 9/11: “We proposed using economic aid related […]
Tags: #Afghanistan #Conflict #Failure #International development #War on Terror
About me
Logan Cochrane
Associate Professor at HBKU in the College of Public Policy. He is an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences and an Adjunct Professor at Hawassa University (Institute for Policy and Development Research). Over the last fifteen years, he has worked in Afghanistan, Benin, Burundi, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Logan acts as a consultant for governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations, seeking to create bridges between research and practice.
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