Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture
in Recurrent and Protracted Crises
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Simon Levine

Simon Levine leads the Pastoralism and Crises thematic group in SPARC. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute and specialises in livelihoods and vulnerability analysis, land rights, and in early response in humanitarian crises.

Featured resources

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A group of women gather under a shelter on a sunny day
Technical report

Retrospective learning and resilience-building in Chad – what happened five years after a project introduced climate-smart agriculture?
Two mismatched puzzle pieces representing valuable assets and mass employment try to fit in the same place, which is also mismatched.
Technical report

This report sets out to see if it is possible to assess the impacts PWP assets have on people’s livelihoods in order to learn new lessons about how, when — or whether — to use PWP.
Kodet Abraham harvests fodder that he has grown for his livestock, Karamoja, Uganda, 2021. Image by Ezra Millstein / Mercy Corps
Technical report

Northern Uganda continues to cope with the aftermath of war, despite millions of dollars in aid and numerous post-war development programmes.
Local farmers in Khost Province Afghanistan - image by Resolute Support Media - CC BY 2.0 DEED
Policy brief

This policy brief looks at why aid practitioners' governance reforms in Afghanistan failed to understand or engage with existing village-level governance structures.
An Afghan farmer and his family stand beside a tractor - image by SOC Neil Chapman Defence Images - CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED

This policy brief looks at how aid practitioners in Afghanistan assumed a high degree of uniformity in the rural economy that does not exist, to the detriment of development interventions.

Latest news and features

Four weeks after the rains, this pond in Makueni county, Kenya, built through public works, was almost dry, and no-one was using what water was left as it was contaminated by livestock.
Blog

Too many public works programmes may be failing to deliver long-term benefits – not due to poor execution, but by design. If we want to use them effectively, we need to rethink what they are trying to achieve.
An abandoned water tower.
Blog

If one picture says a thousand words, then a whole volume on resilience building through water projects is captured in these six photographs.
A young girl wearing a shawl over her head carries a bucket as she walls passed some tents
Blog

What do aid practitioners need to do to engage more seriously with context? Simon Levine unpacks the key lessons from SPARC's new report.

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