For nearly 30 years I worked with Oxfam GB. My roles included representative in India, Emergencies Coordinator and Regional Manager for East Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Following the Kosovo crisis of 1999, I became increasingly concerned that humanitarian aid was becoming more closely associated with Western political interests and priorities. This led to a wider enquiry about my experiences with Oxfam. What did it all mean? I took a sabbatical year and wrote a book - The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War (Earthscan 2001). For orders see earthscan.co.uk or amazon.co.uk.

Major changes in Oxfam presented an opportunity to move on. I had done my share of the hard work of responding to disasters, and seen enough of the horror of war. I was exhausted after developing and managing the new region in the post-Communist countries, and trying to balance a budget that was drawn largely from external donors. Oxfam was going through constant processes of change and as it grew larger becoming more corporate in its culture. I was becoming more individualistic - feeling the need to question and think more than ever before.

It was very fortunate that I was offered the chance to team up with Jonathan Goodhand, who was developing a method of analysing conflict for DFID. He invited me to take part in one of the case studies, Kyrgyzstan, and this led to work on the publication of a methodology for DFID. 'Strategic Conflict Assessment' became DFID's main method of integrating the understanding of conflict into its development work. Subsequently, I conducted conflict studies for DFID in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Nepal and Nigeria. I also co-wrote a number of policy papers on conflict for DFID including an Issues Paper on 'Education, Conflict and International Development'. Similar work with for the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery at UNDP led to the development of a similar methodology - Conflict-related Development Analysis (CDA). For links to these publications see Conflict Analysis

Meanwhile I also kept up my links with Gujarat in India, where I had lived for 4 years in the 1970s. After the earthquake of January 2001, I monitored and then evaluated the response of the British agencies under the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC). This brought me back in touch with local organisations including the Disaster Mitigation Institute (DMI) which collaborated in the DEC evaluation, conducting a public opinion survey of more than 3,000 people affected by the earthquake. I also got back in touch with the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA). This remarkable union of more than 500,000 working women invited me to study their own response to the earthquake and then to write a book about their responses to disasters. This is now in preparation.

Work on the SEWA book made me increasingly aware that poor people are more concerned about security or reducing risk rather than about poverty and development. This led me to wonder whether conflict analysis could be adjusted to meet general concerns about risk and insecurity. Working with ActionAid and then Tearfund, I simplified the DFID methodology so that it could be used in participative workshops by groups of staff. Marcus Oxley of Tearfund had already worked on a method for vulnerability analysis. We linked the two methods to form a single 'Human Security Framework' - a methodology that combined the analysis of conflict with other forms of vulnerability.

All this illustrated to me that we need to be more conscious of our Western preconceptions and more responsive to those of very poor people. This took me back into the question of transparency and accountability.

It seemed to me that Western agencies are much better at gathering the information they think they need rather than helping poor people to acquire the information they need in order to participate in discussions and influence the processes of aid. This fed into work on the World Disasters Report for 2006, for which I wrote the leading chapter, focused on the issue of information. It has also influenced recent work evaluating the response of the DEC agencies to the Asian Tsunami Disaster.