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Rather than a glossy brochure that no one reads, your strategy should be an ongoing practice that informs your decisions and adapts as circumstances change. A Viewpoint from the Summer 2019 issue.

The Scale Up Sourcebook is informed and inspired by the September 2018 conference, Innovations in Agriculture: Scaling Up to Reach Millions, organized by Purdue University, in partnership with the African Development Bank. The Sourcebook consolidates, extends, and disseminates some of the scaling insights presented at the Purdue conference. It is intended as an easy-to-use guidebook targeted to a broad and diverse audience of stakeholders associated with scaling agricultural technologies and...

Polycentricity is a fundamental concept in commons scholarship that connotes a complex form of governance with multiple centers of semiautonomous decision making. If the decision-making centers take each other into account in competitive and cooperative relationships and have recourse to conflict resolution mechanisms, they may be regarded as a polycentric governance system. In the context of natural resource governance, commons scholars have ascribed a number of advantages to polycentric...

Healthcare systems are increasingly recognised as complex, in which a range of non-linear and emergent behaviours occur. China’s healthcare system is no exception. The hugeness of China, and the variation in conditions in different jurisdictions present very substantial challenges to reformers, and militate against adopting one-size-fits-all policy solutions. As a consequence, approaches to change management in China have frequently emphasised the importance of sub-national experimentation,...

More and more global aid agencies believe they should replace one-size-fits-all best practices with locally tailored solutions, but they must shift from just agreeing to “go local” to preparing development experts for the task by taking on three major problems with their internal practices.

Tools and expertise to improve the evidence base for national and international Illegal Wildlife Trade policy already exist but are underutilised. Tapping into these resources would produce substantive benefits for wildlife conservation and associated sectors, enabling governments to better meet their obligations under the Sustainable Development Goals and international biodiversity conventions. This can be achieved through enhanced funding support for inter-sectoral research...

This rapid review summarises the evidence on how to scale up inclusive approaches to complex social change. It looks at how to design scalable inclusive change interventions, as well as how to plan and manage the scale-up process. Focusing on interventions with the aim of reaching the most marginalised and transform social norms, it covers programmes aiming to deliver inclusive outcomes for women and girls (with a particular focus on preventing violence against women and girls) and persons...

Aspects of the research and practice paradigm known as the diffusion of innovations are applicable to the complex context of health care, for both explanatory and interventionist purposes. This article answers the question, “What is diffusion?” by identifying the parameters of diffusion processes: what they are, how they operate, and why worthy innovations in health care do not spread more rapidly. We clarify how the diffusion of innovations is related to processes of dissemination and...

AbstractForeign aid donors are increasingly focused on changing the way their development agencies function. This discourse has focused on desired qualities, including greater knowledge of local contextual realities, appropriate adaptation to context and greater flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. We argue that more attention needs to be devoted to the achievement of these qualities and turn to contingency theory to identify some under-exploited ways to ?do development...

Policymaking is rarely ‘evidence-based’. Rather, policy can only be strongly evidence-informed if its advocates act effectively. Policy theories suggest that they can do so by learning the rules of political systems, and by forming relationships and networks with key actors to build up enough knowledge of their environment and trust from their audience. This knowledge allows them to craft effective influencing strategies, such as to tell a persuasive and timely story about an urgent policy...

This brief reviews the evidence from Learning to Make All Voices Count (L-MAVC), a programme funded by Making All Voices Count, and implemented in collaboration with Global Integrity. L-MAVC intended to support six Making All Voices Count grantees, working in five countries, in co-creating and applying a participatory, learning-centred, and adaptive approach to strengthening citizen engagement in governance processes in their contexts, including with respect to the Open Government...

There are increasing criticisms of dominant models for scaling up health systems in developing countries and a recognition that approaches are needed that better take into account the complexity of health interventions. Since Reform and Opening in the late 1970s, Chinese government has managed complex, rapid and intersecting reforms across many policy areas. As with reforms in other policy areas, reform of the health system has been through a process of trial and error. There is increasing...

We explain why international development organizations have had so little success building and reforming public sector institutions in developing countries. They often fail despite their apparently strong commitment to achieving measurable results and extraordinary amounts of time, money, and effort. We demonstrate that, when donors and lenders make access to financing contingent upon achievement of performance targets, recipient countries tend to choose easy and shallow institutional...

Resolving uncertainties in managed social-ecological systems requires adaptive experimentation at whole-ecosystem levels. However, whether participatory adaptive management fosters ecological understanding among stakeholders beyond the sphere of science is unknown. We experimentally involved members of German angling clubs (n = 181 in workshops, n = 2483 in total) engaged in self-governance of freshwater fisheries resources in a large-scale ecological experiment of active adaptive management...

(2017). Critical agency and development: applying Freire and Sen to ICT4D in Zambia and Brazil. Information Technology for Development. Ahead of Print. doi: 10.1080/02681102.2017.1328656

Van Deth’s comprehensive ‘conceptual map of political participation’ has reinstated a lively debate about the concept of political participation, and provides some compelling solutions to it. However, an important question that has been raised is whether van Deth’s map actually achieves its main goal of unambiguously identifying and classifying emerging, complex types of participation, like online political activism – or lifestyle politics. To contribute to this debate, this article aims to...

Development is going digital and INGOs like Oxfam have a vital convening role to play. This paper draws on ICT for Development in Oxfam’s programmes in the Horn, East and Central Africa to consider what this role is.  In order to realise the opportunities

In this article we seek to revisit what the term ‘technopolitical’ means for democratic politics in our age. We begin by tracing how the term was used and then transformed through various and conflicting adaptations of ICTs (Information and

The practice of using rigorous scientific evaluations to study solutions to global poverty is relatively young. Although researchers continue to advance our knowledge of the mechanisms at work, confusion about their role and value persists. Having evidence from specific studies is fine and good, but for policy makers, the point is not simply to understand poverty, but to eliminate it. Do decisions always need to be informed by evidence from the local context? What potential and limits do...