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Doing development differently rests on deliberate efforts to reflect and learn, not just about what programmes are doing and achieving, but about how they are working. This is particularly important for an action research programme like Child Labour: Action- Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA), which is implemented by a consortium of organisations from across the research and development spectrum, during a rapidly changing global pandemic. Harnessing the potential...

Inclusive and rigorous peacebuilding evaluation is both vital and complex. In this blog we share examples of how we are innovating our methodologies to move towards participatory and adaptive practice.

ParEvo is a web application that enables the collaborative construction and exploration of a range of alternative futures: likely and unlikely, desirable and undesirable. These are described in the form of a branching narrative structure, developed over a series of iterations involving the interactions of a group of participants. These detailed storylines about the future contrast with optimistic, skeletal and largely singular views of the future found in diagrammatic ToCs often encountered...

Self-Critical reflections on AM and TWP. Linking it with The Hype Cycle - "it feels like we are heading downward to the ‘trough of disillusionment’ form the initial peak of ‘inflated expectations’, but we will bounce back to something more sustained, that becomes a permanent feature of the aid landscape".

This guidebook codifies the principles and methods of applying systems change and portfolio approaches to complex development challenges with practical tools and examples. It is based on the empirical learning generated from the collaborative initiatives in UNDP Country Offices in Bhutan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Viet Nam with support from Regional Innovation Centre for Asia and the Pacific.

Getting serious about systems change

Systems approaches are currently being advocated and implemented to address complex challenges in Public Health. These approaches work by bringing multi-sectoral stakeholders together to develop a collective understanding of the system, and then to identify places where they can leverage change across the system. Systems approaches are unpredictable, where cause-and-effect cannot always be disentangled, and unintended consequences – positive and negative – frequently arise. Evaluating such...

Digitalisation is perhaps the most important strategic challenge that governance will face over the coming decade. The process is delivering digital dividends as well as new exclusions and injustices, with the rapid but uneven increase in access to mobile and internet technologies transforming how social and economic life takes place. This report highlights the key opportunities and challenges arising from digitalisation.

Introduction:The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique is a complex-aware monitoring and evaluation tool, widely recognized for various adaptive management purposes. The documentation of practical examples using the MSC technique for an ongoing monitoring purpose is limited. We aim to fill the current gap by documenting and sharing the experience and lessons learned of The Challenge Initiative (TCI), which is scaling up evidence-based family planning (FP) and adolescent and youth sexual...

A critical appraisal's of CEDIL papers on Evaluating Complex Interventions... A study was recently published by the Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL) entitled Evaluating complex interventions in international development. This is the sort of title that raises great expectations. Complexity is a hugely popular theme and many of us are keen to know more about how to evaluate efforts that seek to achieve results amid complexity. In April 2021, CEDIL conducted a...

While over time theories of change have become synonymous with simple if/then statements, a strong theory of change should actually be a much more detailed, context-specific articulation of how we *theorize* change will happen under a program.

This guide is a basic reference on systems thinking and practice tailored to the context and needs of the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). It is an output of the FCDO Knowledge for Development Programme (K4D), which facilitated a Learning Journey on Systems Thinking and Practice with FCDO staff during 2021 and 2022. The guide offers a common language and shared framing of systems thinking for FCDO and its partners. It explores what this implies for...

It’s always a red letter day when a new paper from Graham Teskey drops. His most recent is Thinking and working politically: What have we learned since 2013? For those that don’t know him, Graham is a consummate insider-outsider within the aid sector – long stints at DFID (UK), DFAT (Australia) and now Abt (Management Consultants). From this vantage point he has been one of the leading proponents of ‘thinking and working politically’, always ready to call out the hand-wavey academics and...

Executive Summary When Christian Aid (CA) Ireland devised its multi-country and multi-year Irish Aid funded Programme Grant II (2017-2022), they opted to move away from a linear programme management approach and to explore an adaptive one. Across seven countries: Angola, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, CA and partner organisations support marginalised communities to realise their rights, reduce violence and address...

This note explains what adaptive aid management is; why and when it should be considered; and how it should be applied. It covers all Danish development support channels and modalities, including bilateral country assistance, assistance to and through civil society, the private sector and to and through multilateral organisations. This guide has three chapters. Chapter 1 provides an executive overview of what adaptive management is. Chapter 2 goes deeper into five key operational principles...

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 so that a new configuration can emerge, serving a new purpose. In this article...

The positive deviance approach in international development scales practices and strategies of positively-deviant individuals and groups: those who are able to achieve significantly better development outcomes than their peers despite having similar resources and challenges. This approach relies mainly on traditional data sources (e.g. surveys and interviews) for identifying those positive deviants and for discovering their successful solutions. The growing availability of non-traditional...

This article explores the challenges of monitoring and evaluating politically informed and adaptive programmes in the international development field. We assess the strengths and weaknesses of some specific evaluation methodologies which have been suggested as particularly appropriate for these kinds of programmes based on scholarly literature and the practical experience of the authors in using them. We suggest that those methods which assume generative causality are particularly well...

Motivation In the last decade, a movement formed around making aid delivery more adaptive, relying on principles such as context sensitivity, flexibility, and ownership. The approaches seem promising for civil society organizations (CSOs) to fulfil their mission of fostering social transformation. While several donor agencies have started engaging with such approaches, the authors hardly see their political implications in practice. Purpose The article aims to provide evidence on an adaptive...