As of March 2026, this website is no longer being updated. I now work mainly on climate issues, especially in Brighton and Hove, and new work can be found on the website of Climate:Change, our independent think-tank on socially inclusive action in the City: www.climatechangebh.org.uk.
Meanwhile, however, this website has over 850 entries, mostly representing my work on international development from 2010-2025. Among much else, there are over 50 book reviews, more than 20 papers and training cases on bridging research and policy and on managing think-tanks, nearly 100 articles on climate change, and many papers on other topics, including aid, food security and nutrition, and the future of international development. See ‘Topics and Themes’ for more details. I can be reached at sm@simonmaxwell.net.
How do development and foreign policy connect?
How do development and foreign policy connect?, ODIOverseas Development Institute (London) Opinion 93, December 2007
'For a long time, the development aid community has worked to ring-fence aid and ensure that it is used specifically for 'poverty reduction'. Historically, this has its roots in the often well-founded fear that ‘they’ would use ‘our’ money to further geo-strategic political or commercial interests that could only loosely be described as developmental – supporting some states, punishing others, using aid money to fund repression, diverting aid money to help rich country companies, and so on. Specific cases have been central to the aid debate for a generation – from US aid to Israel, Egypt and South Vietnam, through the scandal of the Pergau Dam, to EUEuropean Union aid for the ‘ring of friends’ in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Administrative and legislative instruments have been used to reinforce the stockade – whether restrictive rules on what can legitimately be claimed as official development assistance (oda), agreed by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), or the passage of the International Development Act in the UK, which limits the use of aid to poverty reduction................. (see link in title for full article)