Thinking and working politically: What have we learned since 2013

The Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) Community of Practice (CoP) was established at a small meeting tacked on at the end of a meeting of Governance Advisers working for the United Kingdom’s Department of International Development (DFID) on South and South-East Asian countries, held in Delhi in November 2013. Since then, a number of meetings have been held throughout the world, each addressing different issues; ‘TWP’ has entered the lexicon of mainstream development; the CoP has expanded to more than 300 people; a Washington DC chapter has been established; and the International CoP has been granted modest funding from DFID’s successor, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). It is legitimate to ask, however, what has been achieved operationally: how have the ideas underpinning TWP affected operational practice? This short paper traces the evolution of the idea and practice of TWP from 2013 to late 2021, and identifies what we have learned. What has been successful, and what has not? I asked in 2017 whether TWP had become a second orthodoxy (Teskey, 2017). Did this represent hubris or was 2017 in some ways the apogee of what might rather grandly be called the TWP ‘movement’?