06/12/23 Humans of ID: Episode 1 Professor Duncan Green
Valentina Papu: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome back after a long time to the Humans of ID podcast, but this time with a twist. This is the Careers and Professional Development edition hosted by the Department of International Development of the London School of Economics and Political Science, organized by the Careers and Professional ID Student Organizers.
My name is Valentina Papu, and I'm here with Duncan Green, Professor in Practice in International Development here at the LSE, and Senior Strategic Advisor at Oxfam Great Britain, to talk about the prospects and challenges involved in entering and working in the development sector. Hello, Duncan. How are you?
Professor Duncan Green: Hello, Valentina. Very good. How are you?
Valentina Papu: I'm very good, too. Thank you. We're thrilled that we had the opportunity to talk with you today, given your outstanding and multifaceted professional experience in the development sector. So, without further ado, could you first tell us what drove you to [00:01:00] pursue a career in this path?
What were your main inspirations?
Professor Duncan Green: Well, I'm feeling a slight imposter syndrome because I only really entered this sector at the age of about 40 and before then was kind of a random, um, collection of careers and jobs. So, um, I studied physics at college, um, which didn't really equip me to do anything. I then traveled to Latin America, and I went and I ended up living in your country, Argentina, uh, under the military.
And that was when I started discovering politics. I started discovering human rights. You know, my friends had disappeared relatives under the military. It was very powerful. And so, I became very interested in Latin America politics. And for something like 15 years I was writing and being an activist around Central America. 'cause this was the era of wars in Central America. Many of them fueled by the United States. So, I became quite an anti-imperialist. Um, I became a Sandinista or Sandalista as we used to call them 'cause these were foreigners wearing sandals supporting the revolution. [00:02:00] Um, and I loved writing. So, I suppose the thing that brought me into the sector most was being a journalist for a while, writing books, publishing. So, I started to develop a writing style and an interest in synthesizing Um, uh, overall lessons and overall, uh, patterns in what was going on in Latin America at that time. And then, when I was about 40, a friend of mine came round with a to, uh, practice for a, for a job, um, uh, interview at CAFOD, the Catholic Aid Agency.
And after we talked for a few minutes he said, I think you should apply for it, not me. So that was very nice of him. Thank you, Alan. So, I applied for the job and I got it and I've been in the aid sector ever since.
Valentina Papu: So, you mentioned that you started out as an activist. Could you tell us a little bit more how did that went about?
Professor Duncan Green: Yeah. Well, um, when I left Argentina, um, I was travelling up through the Andes like, you know, like backpacker. And I'd been [00:03:00] given the address of a man who was, um, uh, the mayor of a small village on the shores of Lake Titicaca. And he had the wonderful name of Tito Castro. Um, and, uh, I went and saw him, and he was an inspirational figure.
He was a lapsed seminarian, so he'd been trained to be a priest, but then he, he was so political that he had to leave that. And what he was doing was travelling from place to place in the high Andes with a library of essentially Marxist books, or Mariátegui, because it was Peru, um, holding discussion classes with indigenous leaders and creating leadership.
And he spent about a week brainwashing me in between sessions with his indigenous leaders and it was transformative. I just came away thinking, I see the world differently now and that is what I want to do. So I was very caught up in this idea of popular struggle. And the idea that, you know, in Latin America for centuries, there have been episodes where, [00:04:00] um, of deep inequality, but also episodes of protest and uprising and political shift.
And I suppose what I've done ever since, uh, uh, that's that week with Tito, um, is kind of process that and start to systematize it and think more about it.

Valentina Papu: Well, that's super interesting. And from being an activist, how did you scale up to go into academia and then also to Oxfam? How did that path went about?
Professor Duncan Green: So, I wasn't a very good activist, actually in the sense of being an outsider campaigner. Um, I kind of felt more comfortable being an insider, so I gravitated very easily when I joined the Catholic Aid Agency when I was 40 in 1997. Um, and I became a lobbyist, an insider person working on trade, WTO. Um, and I, one of my first assignments was to go to a big WTO meeting in Seattle.
Which is famous because it was the one that was, that collapsed and was tear-gassed [00:05:00] and all the rest of it. I was getting tear gassed. But I looked like I was a delegate, so people were yeah, the protesters was shouting shame shame shame at me because I was wearing a suit. But I was from an NGO. It was very strange.
Um, But I really liked that insider world of trying to understand how decisions are made why people do what they do, how you shift or block or create alliances and coalitions? And that pretty much was what I did for I'd guess 10 years or so, first at CAFOD then at Oxfam. A lot of work on trade, a lot of work on agriculture, some work on other things that were going on at the time, like, you know, socially responsible investment and this kind of question.
So, and that led naturally to me becoming more analytical about it and becoming more of an academic about it, which actually made me a worse campaigner because I became very, you know, interested in the ideas and not, and couldn't. A bit less a bit more remote from the actual anger of the I think an activist probably has to [00:06:00] feel. But I did get really interested in understanding it better.
Valentina Papu: That is super interesting, and you mentioned a little bit the part of Communication and I was wondering if you could also tell us a little bit of your famous blog From Poverty to Power It is super interesting and very differential in the development sector.
Tell us more!
Professor Duncan Green: That's very kind of you Valentina. Um, so I had the book called From Poverty to Power coming out in 2008. And when you publish a book, it's like a little death. Because, you know, you've been involved in the book, you're thinking about it, you're talking to people, you send off the manuscript, and then silence. Right? Nothing happens for like nine months until the book is published.
And so, I thought, well how do I fill in this terrible time because I'd done enough books by that stage to know this was coming. So, Oxfam agreed to let me write a blog and it was quite early days in the blogosphere so there weren't too many rules. So, we set up a blog, called it the same name, From Poverty to Power.
And it was just, I wanted just to keep conversations going about the topics of the book. But it very quickly became [00:07:00] clear that more people were reading the blog than were ever going to read the book. And Um, and I found that I really liked it because it's more immediate. You have conversations, you have comments, you have arguments.
Periodically, I make horrible mistakes and have to apologize. Um, and you can do polls, you know. So, I just found the interactivity of blogs and the immediacy of blogs very attractive. And I've been doing it since 2008. And that's about, that must be about getting on for 5 million words on there now. So, it's like 50 books.
Not all mine. so, one of the things that increasingly happens. Uh, over the years, which I'm really, I'm, I'm really happy about is, uh, once the blog was established, I started to ask for more authors and preferably people who don't look like me. Uh, you know, uh, male, pale and stale is the shorthand, right? So younger people, women, people of color.
And so, trying to get that diversity into the blog has been great. I got some funding for it for a couple of years with a great LSE graduate called Maria Faciolince [00:08:00] running a little project on the, on the, on the blog. So, it's nice to play with it. And I think the next thing I'm going to play with is doing a lot more of these podcasts because no one reads blogs anymore.
Everybody wants podcasts and I love chatting to people. So, I'm going to start a series called How to Change the World in 30 Minutes, um, starting in January. So you've got some competition.
Valentina Papu: Thank you very much, Duncan. Without doubt, I'm sure this drive has led you to many incredible professional adventures.
What would you consider to be your most notable achievements in your career?
Professor Duncan Green: So, I guess. Careers accumulate over time if you're lucky. And so, I suppose in some ways the things I've done most recently are the things I'm proudest of because they build on all those wonderful conversations with people in Latin America, uh, around the world, working for Oxfam, working for CAFOD, a brief spell working at, in the British government at DFID.
And then this all turned, ended up in my most recent book, How Change Happens, which then spawned [00:09:00] the, uh, the course I teach at the LSE on activism and a bunch of other courses I'm now giving to UN, INGO, uh, international NGO people, um, uh, Red Cross, Red Crescent. So, I think it's all, it's all cumulative.
So, I suppose that journey I'm very proud of, um, and, uh, the big moments in those things are I'm afraid books. I mean, it's a classic academic thing, but books are just worth a lot more than papers. They're something you slave over, they're much harder to produce. And when you produce them, they are, they're not quite as important as my children, but they're, they're, you know, they're pretty important.
So, I think that I've done five or six books over the years, and those will probably be the, the milestones I would point to
Valentina Papu: How truly fascinating. We're looking forward to read your books. If you haven't done them, we recommend that you do. Um, and I was wondering if you can expand a little bit more about when your beginnings and what you consider were the most important skills that helped you when you first started out and that you consider necessary to enter this professional field. [00:10:00]
Professor Duncan Green: Well, it's a bit weird because I did, I only studied maths and physics from the age of 16. So, I never wrote an essay until I was out of university, and yeah, I really like writing. I wrote absolutely terrible poetry, no, I'm not going to give you any examples, um, and uh, I loved writing, uh, uh, and so that was, in a way, maybe my writing wasn't contaminated by university.
So, that was one of the skills, and to actually enjoy communicating, which is different from just writing, especially writing in academic form which doesn't communicate very well. I really like synthesizing and I like synthesizing ideas and then illustrating them with real examples and so most of my books are in fact not original research they're much more about giving a shape to big picture. So, I wrote a book on neoliberalism in Latin America, you know, the rise of market economics or a book on children in Latin America or a book on From Poverty to [00:11:00] Power, which was like an Oxfam encyclopedia or the last one, How Change Happens, trying to understand the mechanics of change. And in all that, I think the skill, which I didn't have at the beginning, but I've developed as I've gone is what we call POVO, point of view of the other.
So being able to put yourself in someone else's head, both when you're interviewing them, so you see, try and understand how they see the world and how that connects with how you see the world, but also with the readers or the target if you're an influencer or campaigner or whatever, not always being shut in in your own mindset and your own opinions. And that's quite hard to do.
It's something which both academics and activists are often very bad at. Academics are so obsessed with their subject; all they think they need to do is explain it endlessly. And activists are so angry and sort of caught up in the, with their own righteousness, that they just think everybody else is, is just a target. [00:12:00]
And both of those mindsets I think are very bad for communications and for making change happen.
Valentina Papu: Thank you. Thank you, Duncan, for this insight. Honestly, I can for sure see how these tools and skills can be an asset, especially when navigated complicated scenarios. What would you say were your main challenges and how did academia help you navigate this in this regard?
Professor Duncan Green: Well, you're not going to believe this, but I think one of my main challenges is self-confidence. OK, so I was quite shy as a kid, never knew how to ask girls out. It was usually a disaster. Um, I sort of retreated into my physics and kind of quite enjoyed that. Smoked a fair amount of weed at college. Um, uh, and it took me, you know, and the first time I had to speak in public, I spent days preparing and there were two people in the audience and it was terrifying.
And then you just had to, you'd fake it till you make it. You just have to keep doing it, um, until you actually learn to [00:13:00] trust. It's all about learning to trust the audience, learning to engage the audience. Um, if you're anxious, you speak too fast, you're, if you're anxious, you take, you retreat behind your academic language and your academic credentials and you don't communicate.
So, over time you learn that trust, you get a few knockbacks, but you know, you have to learn to, to, to trust the process, to trust the audience. I think that's been one of the personal challenges. And then I suppose academically the challenge was I'd studied the wrong thing, you know, in a way. I mean, I'd studied, Theoretical physics, which really wasn't much use, except that it intimidates economists, which was always useful, um, because they, they, they really want to be physicists.
And so, when you say, actually, I'm a real physicist, they usually get quite intimidated, which is great. Um, but otherwise, I mean, that's a fairly tangential, um, uh, benefit. So, I kind of wish I'd, I'd had more of a foundation reading the great, you know, uh, the great authors and the canon. And I did that late in life.
I did an old man PhD when I was about 50, where you, you, it's called a [00:14:00] PhD by publication, where you produce a, you, you give, submit a hundred thousand words you've already had published and then write a critical review which allows you to go back and read the things you should have read the first time around.
So, I kind of made it up, but I still am not well read and I'm kind of sorry about that.
Valentina Papu: Perfect. Thank you, Duncan. Now just to wrap it up, could you give us one final word of advice to students just starting out in this field?
Professor Duncan Green: I mean, the main thing I teach here is activism, right? So activism is about how you change the system all around you.
And that doesn't necessarily mean being out on the street. It can mean changing the organization, changing attitudes, social norms, anything which you do to change the system. And I think in that, um, in that world of activism, the currency is relationships. Right. So, you are only as good as your relationships.
So, my advice would be build your relationships, [00:15:00] do the seminars, go and see people, phone up and say, can I have a cup of coffee? However awkward it feels, um, trust in that you have a bit of capital in the fact that you're, if you're an LSE graduate, that's a certain kudos and people just want to talk to young people.
They just find it, you know enlivening to do that, but build those relationships because they will at some point be valuable. It's a very Latin American view of life, um, but I think it's absolutely spot on. So that would be my advice.
Valentina Papu: Duncan, thank you so much for your advice, insights, and above all, for being so relatable and reassuring.
I would also like to especially thank all our listeners, the Department of International Development, Maya Bullen, and Andrea Merino Mayayo. And of course, to all the ID student organizers behind this project, including Makayla Levitt, our podcast editor and producer, Razan Awwad, our script co-writer, and Shiwani, our transcript editor and podcast manager.
Please make sure to subscribe to our podcast on Spotify or your preferred platform, [00:16:00] and follow us at the LSE Department of International Development on Instagram and LinkedIn. Send us any comments, suggestions, questions, and thoughts on what you'd like to hear on the International Development link in bio and stay tuned for more.
On our next episode, we'll be joined by LSE professor, Catherine Boone, and we'll continue exploring further insights on how to start out in the development sector. Until next time, this has been your host, Valentina Papu.