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In 2023, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice published Understanding political economy analysis and thinking and working politically. This complementary note sets out more detailed guidance on how to undertake a dynamic Stakeholder Analysis and Political Network Mapping, which are core elements of political economy analysis and other forms of politically informed context analysis. This technical note is for use...

To compare discourses related to different ways of thinking, a bibliometric analysis was performed on the Dimensions database of research documents. Terms related to 78 ways of thinking were ranked according to the number of documents containing them over the last five years (2020 to 2024). Twenty ways of thinking were subjected to further analyses, examining (i) those that are most prevalent (with the top five being critical thinking, design thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking...

Regenerative Evaluation: Evaluation in Service of Life To foster change today means navigating a gap between two realities: the reality of reporting (demanding accountability and proof of impact) and the reality of the planet (calling for regeneration, complexity, and interconnectedness). For too long, evaluation has forced a choice, functioning as an extractive exercise—mining data to count the "fruits" of a project while ignoring the health of the "soil" that sustains them....

This learning paper on funding and entrepreneurship support for adaptation and resilience is a collaboration between SILP and the Climate Adaptation Innovation & Learning Initiative project. It brings together real-world insights from a community of 25 practitioners working across intermediary roles in the climate adaptation and resilience sector. Rather than presenting a fixed model, the paper explores how intermediaries operate in the “in-between spaces”, navigating tensions between...

Despite widespread endorsement of locally led development, donor agencies still struggle to translate local agency into cumulative change. Donor discourse increasingly emphasises localisation and community leadership, yet operational arrangements remain structured around upward compliance. The practical question is how local agency and institutional accountability can work together so that locally generated insights lead the way while portfolio coherence is maintained. This paper examines a...

AI’s role in evaluation: so long and thanks for all the synthesis How generative AI can enhance evaluation and analysis? We share three real-world case studies to explore what works, what doesn’t, and how to harness AI responsibly. Generative AI is everywhere—but is it really the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything? At Itad, we see AI as a powerful assistant, not a replacement for human judgment. Our new learning brief, The evaluator’s guide to generative AI, shares lessons from...

In this blog, Arnaldo Pellini, Kristian Paolo Torres, and Tania Dora Warokka reflect on their experience developing and testing a rubric to support dialogue and learning as complex initiatives are integrated into public systems.

Authors: Suzane Muhereza & Zazie Tolmer Contributor: Simone Uriartt & Bianca Tejada

This supplemental guide offers practical advice for thinking and working politically (TWP) when practicing the Conservation Standards. The CS are a widely used, systematic approach for planning, monitoring, and adapting programs aiming to conserve biodiversity. TWP is an approach to international development that brings greater attunement to the political dynamics of the local programming context in order to enhance development results. Given strong evidence that political factors...

The case for Conversation-based reporting (CBR)

There is growing engagement with “relational” approaches to community development work - interventions that give practical or even metaphysical primacy to relations and processes over identities and outcomes. But what more can we say about the nature and efficacy of such approaches? CLARISSA SP+ and WorkFREE were two major relational community development intervention and research projects that took place in Bangladesh and India respectively. In this article, I compare the experiences and...

This blog launches a new co-design toolkit to support the development of services for early years. The co-design toolkit is a practical set of resources created to enable local authorities and communities to design public services together. It has been

Citizens' assemblies and other democratic innovations are spreading around the world. But they do not spread by themselves. Behind every successful scaling story sits a constellation of organisations doing the essential, often invisible work of building capacity, establishing networks, advocating with decision makers, and ensuring quality standards. These are what we call scaling catalysts: organisations that intentionally drive the expansion of democratic innovations in their regions. In...

The Architecture of Learning: Systems, Infrastructure, and Leadership for Health System Transformation Session Description Health care can improve as a system only if its parts are aligned around the shared purpose of better health for all. This talk will explore how learning health systems integrate science, data, and culture to enable continuous improvement and innovation. Through real-world examples from a single patient’s question to national learning networks, we will examine how...

The growing interest in systems-change initiatives sits alongside increasing pressure to demonstrate value for money (VFM), which is challenging for emergent, interconnected and often intangible work. A new way to assess the VFM of systems-change work involves considering the value of changing system conditions and the creation of potential value for future systems transformation. This innovation combines the Water of Systems Change framework with the Cycles of Value Creation to create five...

This blog by Jonathan Kuhn-Patrick (UK Evaluation Society Trustee and AI Working Group Lead) explores the five emotional stages many evaluators experience as they begin working with AI.

Key Points • The authors identified four archetypes describing philanthropic funders’ approach to AI: The Curious, The Doers, The Dreamers, The Skeptics. • The authors did not find major differences across foundations based on their geographic location, though there were differences found based on their mission and values. Feminist and social justice funders in the Global South demonstrated more skepticism than others. • Even in seemingly benign or straightforward applications, AI systems...

Quality assurance strategies when working on unfamiliar topics