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Learning from our experience in 2020, we asked the alumni of our HKS Implementing Public Policy (IPP) Executive Education program, if they wanted to work with our students on their nominated problems. Eight IPP alumni, William Keith Young, Adaeze Oreh, Milzy Carrasco, Kevin Schilling, Artem Shaipov, George Imbenzi, David Wuyep, and Raphael Kenigsberg, who had been trained on PDIA and implementation, signed up to work with our students. Thirty-seven students signed up to take the course...
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Global development is seeing an exciting paradigm shift. Increasingly, leaders and practitioners recognize that development is not a “complicated” challenge that can be neatly parsed out into separate problems and siloed departments, like assembling a car. Rather, the various tasks of development—poverty eradication, improving governance, climate action, gender equality, and so on—are all connected, making development a “complex” challenge.
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The field of global development has reached a critical turning point. Almost gone is the mechanical, one-size-fits-all “good governance” paradigm of the past. In its place is a growing embrace of complexity and systems thinking. While this is an encouraging shift in the right direction, the discussion mostly ends by concluding that we should adapt. Yuen Yuen Ang urges that it’s time to take our conversation on “complexity & development” to the next level: how to enable adaptation. Effective...
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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.
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Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world's second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang explains this astonishing metamorphosis. Rather than insist that either strong institutions of good governance foster markets or that growth enables good governance, Ang lays out a new, dynamic framework...
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This report explains how public organizations can combine big data and thick data to transform public services delivery—a strategy called mixed analytics. Governments can greatly enhance the value of big data by combining it with “thick” data—rich qualitative information about users, such as their values, goals, and consumption behavior, obtained by observing or interacting with them in their daily lives. Big data holds great promise for improving public services delivery and innovation in...
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My essay considers a central problem of reinventing foreign aid in the twenty-first century: how to reform aid agencies to enable a “best-fit” approach to development assistance. For the past decades, the aid community has tried to transplant best practices from the developed world to the developing world. Increasingly, however, it is recognized that copying best practices does not work and may even backfire; rather, aid programs work best when they are tailored to local contexts. Yet while...
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Many rural poor and marginalized people strive to make a living in social-ecological systems that are characterized by multiple and often inequitable interactions across agents, scale and space. Uncertainty and inequality in such systems require research and development interventions to be adaptive, support learning and to engage with underlying drivers of poverty. Such complexity-aware approaches to planning, monitoring and evaluating development interventions are gaining strength, yet,...
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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.
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This article explores the potential of using participatory action research as an adaptive programming modality to drive learning and innovation to tackle the drivers of (and seek to eliminate) the Worst Forms of Child Labour. We draw on our experience from early phases of implementation of a large-scale action research programme, which despite the constraints covid-19 posed in moving to full implementation and participatory engagement with children and other stakeholders on the ground, is...
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Achieving impact through research for development programmes (R4D) requires engagement with diverse stakeholders across the research, development and policy divides. Understanding how such programmes support the emergence of outcomes, therefore, requires a focus on the relational aspects of engagement and collaboration. Increasingly, evaluation of large research collaborations is employing social network analysis (SNA), making use of its relational view of causation. In this paper, we use...
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This briefing note shares practical learning on the use of contribution analysis for adaptive management (CA4AM). It examines how the approach enables programmes to work with theories of change in a practical, reflexive way, and how, combined with assessing evidence of a programme’s contribution to change, its findings can inform programme adaptation. It also examines both how and to what extent CA enables AM through the experiences of four large complex programmes all working towards...
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The term After Action Review (AAR) is becoming more common in the world of development evaluation, particularly in programmes that focus on evaluation as a formative learning process. As structured and facilitated learning moments, AARs take many shapes always built to support a specific team in a specific moment on their journey. Across such a diversity of practice how do we understand the evolution of the AAR as a method with an action research orientation? Being mindful always of the...
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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...
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Large publicly funded programmes of research continue to receive increased investment as interventions aiming to produce impact for the world’s poorest and most marginalized populations. At this intersection of research and development, research is expected to contribute to complex processes of societal change. Embracing a co-produced view of impact as emerging along uncertain causal pathways often without predefined outcomes calls for innovation in the use of complexity-aware approaches to...
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