News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
Whatever we might say is right or wrong with cities of the 21st century, they’re indisputably a defining feature of our age. As much as we’re post-modern, post-gender or post-colonial, we’re also post-rural. Our existence, for an increasing majority, is urban. Even more than that, our aspirations are urban. This […]
If you happen to visit Egypt and find yourself in the famous Tahrir Square, you might be puzzled: how could this space accommodate two million protesters? In fact, the square looked different at the time of the Arab Spring, up until the new military government ringed its central part with an iron […]
With the Trump administration thinking about taking the US out of the Paris Agreement and already rolling back domestic climate policies, all eyes have turned to China and whether the world’s largest emitter can occupy the leadership void left by the US. President Xi Jinping has called the 2015 Paris […]
The first day of the Challenges of Government Conference featured a conversation with the mayor of the world’s most innovative city, Medellín, Colombia, moderated by the Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, Professor Ngaire Woods. In line with the theme of this year’s conference “Flourishing Cities”, BSG hosted the […]
Peppered with questions and comments from the audience and lively, engaging discussion throughout, this Challenges of Government Conference session about the future of public transport in cities was truly enjoyable…
Academics and policymakers need to work harder to ensure that the best evidence informs and gets translated into the most effective public policies. That is one of the main underlying conclusions from the “Challenges of Government: Flourishing Cities” conference, organised by the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government and held in Oxford last week.
‘Flourishing Cities’ is the theme this week of our annual Challenges of Government conference at the Blavatnik School of Government here in Oxford. From an Africa perspective, the conference programme speaks to the scale of urban development and human security challenges in fast-growing cities. Far from Oxford’s pleasant setting, these challenges come across very vividly in the heaving expanse of cities from the Cape Flats in South Africa to Cairo.
Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal and home to an estimated 2.5m people, sits in a zone of high seismic activity. The city has historically been hit by a major earthquake every 70 or 80 years. The last big one was in 1934. The eight-magnitude quake destroyed most of Kathmandu’s houses, […]