Michael Aubrey "Mike" Edwards (born Liverpool, England, 1957) is a writer and activist who has worked in various positions in foundations, think-tanks and international development institutions and who has written widely on civil society, philanthropy and social transformation.
He first came to prominence in the 1980s during his work with Oxfam when he criticized the “Irrelevance of Development Studies” in an article that sparked many years of debate about the extractive nature of social science research, a theme that he has continued to pursue ever since.
[3] In the 1990s he moved to Save the Children UK and set up a partnership with David Hulme from the University of Manchester to host a series of influential conferences on scaling-up the impact of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), strengthening their performance and accountability, assessing the costs and benefits of closer ties between NGOs, governments and international donor agencies, and exploring how NGOs could adapt to globalization and the increasing diversity of the “North” and the “South.” After leaving Save the Children UK, Edwards wrote a book called "Future Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century" which laid out a new vision for foreign aid, humanitarian assistance, and global action on inequality, poverty and the environment.
which appeared on openDemocracy in 2016, and in a series of articles on the Transformation website that critiqued the scandals that emerged around sexual harassment and exploitation in Oxfam and Save the Children UK in 2018 and 2019.
More broadly his work shows why even high and rising levels of philanthropy have failed to have any measurable effect on inequality and injustice at a national scale because they are too weakly linked to the drivers of social, economic and political change.