By Jeremy Allouche, Professor in Development Studies, University of Sussex
Despite billions being spent on impact assessments around the world, they often end up being just dusty reports on the shelf.
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By Johan Fourie, Professor, Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University
In 1825, a tax collector compiling a census in South Africa’s Cape Colony paused to write a poem in the margin of his work. In it, he complained about the idle chatter of townsmen in Stellenbosch and uncooperative taxpayers. It is a tiny window on the regular frustrations of a 19th-century taxman. But the poem survives only because the bureaucracy did.
Year after year, from the 1660s to the 1840s, local officials appointed by the Dutch East India Company and, after 1806, the British colonial government, recorded settler households, their harvests and their labour obligations in ledgers…
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By Long Li, Professor, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta
Researchers have discovered that chemical reactions in underwater hydrothermal vents could have produced the necessary ingredients for life on Earth.
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By Ronald W. Pruessen, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Toronto
The experiences of Donald Trump’s predecessors remind us of the dangers inherent in the inevitable human frailty of the very powerful.
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Thursday, January 22, 2026
As President Trump launched the international Board of Peace plan for Gaza on Thursday, top independent rights experts tasked by the UN Human Rights Council with investigating grave abuses linked to the Hamas-Israel war pledged to continue their work seeking justice and accountability for all.
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By Mark Russell, NIHR Advanced Fellow, Rheumatology and Epidemiology, King's College London
When COVID hit, healthcare systems around the world were turned upside down. Hospitals cleared beds, routine appointments were cancelled and people were told to stay at home unless it was urgent. In England, visits to family doctors and hospital admissions for non-COVID reasons fell by a third in the early months of the pandemic. Medical staff were redeployed, routine clinics were cancelled and diagnostic tests were postponed.
Against this backdrop, the number of people newly diagnosed with long-term…
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By Matthew Flinders, Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield
Ian C Elliott, Senior Lecturer in Public Administration, University of Glasgow
Rebecca Riley, Professor Enterprise, Engagement, and Impact, University of Birmingham
Public administration has never been the glitziest or most immediately attractive discipline to study. With this in mind, the government’s announcement that it intends to establish a new National School of Government and Public Services (NSGPS) – in-house training for civil servants – is easily overlooked as little more than administrative tinkering in a world beset by uncertainty and turbulence.
And yet to see this announcement as little more than peripheral politics would be wrong: it matters.…
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By Robert Dover, Professor of Intelligence and National Security & Dean of Faculty, University of Hull
Delegates at the World Economic Forum at Davos have been confronted with starkly opposing visions of the future of world affairs.
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By Abhimanyu Bandyopadhyay
Tarique Rahman’s return marks a defining moment for Bangladesh’s politics, energizing the Bangladesh Nationalist Party amid deep uncertainty, rising tensions, and an urgent search for democratic leadership.
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By Kevin Kristian, PhD student in Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University
Wandering or ‘exit-seeking’ is common in dementia, often triggered by confusion or memory loss. Families need practical strategies and government support to navigate the risks.
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