As of March 2026, this website is no longer being updated.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 to help reform multilateral institutions: an eight-step program for more effective collective action
How to help reform multilateral institutions: an eight-step program for more effective collective action, Global Governance, Volume 11, No. 4, November 2005
Dissension over Iraq in 2003 challenged the legitimacy and effectiveness of the UN. It also highlighted long-standing problems that previous UN institutional reform efforts had failed to resolve. Kofi Annan has been a reforming secretary-general, but even he acknowledged in September 2003 that the core UN institutions needed "radical reform." (1) The High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change was the response: (2) wide-ranging, certainly; radical, up to a point; and with at least some of its core recommendations regarding peacebuilding and protection likely implemented at the UN summit in September 2005................. (see link in title for full article)