As of March 2026, this website is no longer being updated.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.
The pilot IFFInternational Finance Facility gets the go-ahead. Now is the time to start talking about the future aid architecture, ODIOverseas Development Institute (London) Blog, August 2005
Eurostat and the UK Office of National Statistics have announced an important decision which will pave the way for governments to contribute to the pilot version of Gordon Brown's proposed International Finance Facility, and perhaps eventually to the full-scale IFF. This means aid will rise even faster than already planned. A conversation about how to reshape the aid architecture becomes ever more urgent.Both the IFFIM and the full-scale IFFInternational Finance Facility are designed to front-load aid, and work by governments borrowing capital sums from bond markets against future repayments. The question was whether statistical authorities would insist that the totality of contributions to the immunisation pilot be counted against government expenditure at the time of the original borrowing, or whether they would be counted only when repayments were made. If the former, then the benefit of the mode of financing would effectively disappear.....................
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