Search

This document is a an Introductory Toolkit for for civil servants. It is one component of a suite of documents that aims to act as a springboard into systems thinking for civil servants unfamiliar with this approach. These documents introduce a small sample of systems thinking concepts and tools, chosen due to their accessibility and alignment to civil service policy development, but which is by no means comprehensive. They are intended to act as a first step towards using systems thinking...

The UNDP Accelerator Labs were designed as an agile and dynamic Network to allow communication and information transfer between 91 Accelerator Labs in 115 countries, and with the global innovation ecosystem, UNDP as a whole, and thousands of partners including grassroots innovators and their communities. The accumulated knowledge of this Network creates new pathways to the solutions that hold the key to sustainable development problems. What it looked like and how it unfolded last year will...

USAID’s Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL) and its support mechanism, LEARN, have developed a Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) Framework and Maturity tool to help USAID missions think more deliberately about how to plan for and implement CLA approaches that fit the mission’s context and assist them in achieving their development objectives. While the tool is intended primarily for USAID audiences to be used in participatory self-assessment workshops, the CLA Framework...

USAID’s Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL) and its support mechanism, LEARN, have developed a Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) Framework and Maturity tool to help USAID missions think more deliberately about how to plan for and implement CLA approaches that fit the mission’s context and assist them in achieving their development objectives. While the tool is intended primarily for USAID audiences to be used in participatory self-assessment workshops, the CLA Framework...

Although collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) are not new to USAID and its implementing partners, they often do not happen regularly or systematically and are not intentionally resourced. The CLA Framework above identifies components and subcomponents to help you think more deliberately about what approach to CLA might be best tailored to your organizational or project context. The framework recognizes the diversity of what CLA can look like in various organizations and projects while...

This paper reviews promising methods for the evaluation of complex interventions that are new or have been used in a limited way. It offers a taxonomy of complex interventions in international development and draws on literature to discuss several methods that can be used to evaluate these interventions. Complex interventions are those that are characterised by multiple components, multiple stakeholders, or multiple target populations. They may also be interventions that incorporate...

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...

In community engagement and participatory processes, facilitators must make intentional efforts and adopt inclusive strategies to include marginalized and frequently overlooked groups. Yet, there is a lack of guidance on how to inclusively facilitate participatory processes. Facilitators are therefore often poorly prepared to engage with the power relations that underlie these processes, including those between the facilitator and participants and among participants themselves. This guide...

What does governance look like ‘from below’ – from the perspectives of poor and marginalised households? How do patterns of conflict affect that? These were the questions at the heart of the Governance at the Margins research project. Over three years from 2017-2020 we worked to explore this through in-depth study in conflict-affected areas of Mozambique, Myanmar, and Pakistan. Our research teams interviewed the same people regularly over that time, finding out how they resolved problems and...

As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering,...

Technical assistance is provided to country governments as part of international development programmes to support policymaking or strengthen state capability. This article presents the conceptual evolution of ‘technical assistance’ linked to capacity development, starting with programmes aiming exclusively to enhance individual capacity in the 1950s to 1970s and progressing to complex systems approaches in the past ten years. It also presents some of the frequent challenges in designing and...

The Method Positive Deviance (PD) is based on the observation that in every community or organization, there are a few individuals who achieve significantly better outcomes than their peers, despite having similar challenges and resources. These individuals are referred to as positive deviants, and adopting their solutions is what is referred to as the PD approach¹. The method described in this Handbook follows the same logic as the PD approach but uses pre-existing, non-traditional data...

In Building Better Systems, we introduced four keys to unlock system innovation: purpose and power, relationships and resource flows. These four keys make up a set. Systems are often hard to change because power, relationships, and resource flows are locked together in a reinforcing pattern to serve the system’s current purpose. Systems start to change fundamentally when this pattern is disrupted and opened up. Then a new configuration can emerge, serving a new purpose. In this essay...

The issues of poverty, inequality, racial justice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on industrial models of production and power to "solve" social problems, are not helping. In fact, they are designed to entrench the status quo. In The Systems Work of Social Change, Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici draw on two hundred years of history and a treasure trove of stories of committed social changemakers to uncover...

Localisation and locally led international development practice has long been discussed, but has still not been delivered. Systemic barriers have posed challenges, and the term itself is contested. Now, the last tumultuous 18 months could provide a critical juncture to finally move forward with this crucial agenda. The pandemic has highlighted structural inequalities in the global system, and disrupted ways of working in the international development sector. The Black Lives Matter movement...

This scoping paper explores the question ‘what would it take to build a culture of learning at scale?’. It focuses on systems-wide learning that can help to inform systems change efforts in complex contexts. To answer this question, literature was reviewed from across diverse disciplines and the realms of education, innovation systems, systems thinking and knowledge management. This inquiry was also supported by in-depth interviews with numerous specialists from the for-purpose sector and...

This report presents six learnings from four pilot projects conducted by the Data Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) initiative, a global collaboration between the GIZ Data Lab, the UNDP Accelerator Labs Network, the University of Manchester Center for Digital Development, and UN Global Pulse Lab Jakarta. The pilots seek out grassroots solutions to development challenges that range from the interaction between livestock farming and deforestation to gender-based violence and insecurity in dense...

This Flagship report analyses 20 years of governance programmes in Nigeria funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in the North-western states of Jigawa (since 2001), Kano (since 2005) and Kaduna (since 2006), as well as the North-eastern state of Yobe (since 2011). The report’s main research question is whether, how, under what conditions and for whom UK-funded state-level governance programmes in Nigeria...

Some important lessons are as follows: First, identifying a policy problem is critical for reforms to get traction both at a political and administrative level. Second, appropriate solutions can emerge from a process of experimentation, iteration, and adaptation. Third, building teams and institutional capabilities is a critical part of solving complex problems in a sustainable way.

This is the second blog in our series ‘Lessons on using Contribution Analysis for impact evaluation’. In our first blog, we introduced Contribution Analysis (CA) as an overarching approach to theory-based evaluation and the idea of causal hotpots as a way to zoom in, unpack and make the hard choices of where to focus evaluation research. Identifying specific links in the theory of change (ToC) with specific evaluation questions enables you to then choose appropriate methods. We have applied...