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This paper shares an insider's perspective on the spread of Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) across the US Agency for International Development (USAID), highlighting lessons learned along the way that are relevant even beyond the dissolution of the Agency in 2025.

Government offices are filled with siloed, sector-specific digital systems that strain their capacity to make decisions, use data effectively, and achieve ambitious sustainable development goals. Public investments in digital development, transformation, and infrastructure can only meet citizen needs if data and systems are consolidated and interoperable. While interoperability is a sensible approach to building digital public infrastructure, transforming existing systems is easier said...

This five-step framework, developed and tested by a foundation, embeds learning in emergent systems change strategies. It prioritizes the testing of hypotheses and assumptions, uses learning questions, and calls for examining both confirming and disconfirming evidence. --- A framework for embedding learning in systems change strategies and for testing strategic uncertainties. Learning and evaluation approaches that accompany systems change efforts need to fit with and support the emergent...

The Reduced Access Analytical Methods (RAAM) toolkit is a practical resource designed to help humanitarian practitioners overcome monitoring challenges in reduced access environments. Reduced access can be caused by natural disaster, conflict, political instability, or other factors, and typically makes it difficult to conduct normal monitoring of program implementation. The RAAM toolkit offers technical and managerial tools for a menu of analytical methods that can fill information gaps...

Over the course of this paper we lay out the basis of the Carve-Out method, an approach that leverages a behavioural framework to allow organisations (even those burdened with layers of bureaucracy and entrenched ideas) to create intentionally designed environments that give people the space, resources and support they need to explore and test new ideas. Ideas that may go on to transform the core of their organisation. The Carve-Out method is based on a simple insight: That if we want to...

The guide begins with a section on what we at TAF have learned about practicing Strategy Testing, highlighting things that we didn’t know when we started out. Some of these lessons may seem obvious, but others may strike you as less so. In any case, we believe that, when taken together, they provide a useful reminder of some of the pitfalls that arise in efforts to practice Adaptive Management. Moreover, they help to remind us that there are multiple layers to doing Strategy Testing...

Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) is an evidence and innovation-generation programme funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), responding to the challenge of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL) in Bangladesh and Nepal. It is a challenge characterised by a poor understanding of its drivers and a lack of evidence on what works to combat it. To handle such fundamental uncertainty, the programme adopts a...

The CommunityFirst Framework is intended to be implemented by field teams at MSF. The theoretical aspects and evidence presented on the importance of community engagement are intended for all MSF staff seeking to learn more about why and how to shift the way we work with communities as humanitarians. We believe this guideline, and other tools like it (including OCA’s Person-Centred Approach Guidance07, and MSF Vienna Evaluation Unit’s Guidance for Involving Communities08), to be an important...

Any mission-focused government should be well equipped to define, from day one, what outcomes it wants to bring about. But radically changing what the government does is only part of the challenge. We also need to change how government does things. The usual methods, we argue in this paper, are too prone to failure and delay. There’s a different approach to public service organisation, one based on multidisciplinary teams, starting with citizen needs, and scaling iteratively by testing...

Doing weeknotes brings together various things I’ve written about weeknotes in different places. This text expands on things I wrote in The agile comms handbook, as well as various blog posts. Quite a lot of it is brand new. - Weeknotes for beginners - Why write weeknotes - The weeknotes rules - Weeknotes within the corporate environment - What weeknotes can bring about - Examples of good weeknotes - How to write weeknotes - Weeknotes tips and tricks - Further reading

Social accountability has become increasingly important to development programming since the 2004 World Development Report spearheaded its first generation of programming. In 2016, Thomas Carothers synthesized global experts’ perspectives on what became known as the second generation. With an evolving global context, new research and evaluations and tacit knowledge on how those assumptions played out in practice, the time is ripe for asking what the evidence since 2004 can tell us about what...

In early 2021 we were asked to support two initiatives in South-East Queensland by undertaking a developmental evaluation of how they collaborated across multiple partners to reduce, prevent and ultimately end homelessness. The initiatives, Brisbane and Logan Zero, started with the ‘Advance to Zero’ methodology, and adapted this as they progressed. We were asked to track how contributors collaborated to tackle the systemic nature of this challenge. This gave us the opportunity to work with...

The Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) programme was a three-year initiative funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) that brought together 20 projects from across the global South to understand the socioeconomic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, improve existing responses, and generate better policy options for recovery. The research covered 42 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to understand the ways in which the pandemic...

Organising for Systems Innovation at Scale Our team at Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation have been experimenting with and evolving a Challenge-led Innovation Approach (based on Mission-oriented approaches developed by Mariana Mazzucato at UCL IIPP and others internationally). We are using this approach to guide the way we work internally and engage with our systems innovation partners. We’ve facilitated intensive Re:Treats, worked with government bodies, businesses and civic...

This note presents the key components of a potential next generation of social accountability programming. The key aspects outlined emerge from a review of over 150 cases as well as tacit knowledge from dozens of practitioners (Guerzovich and Aston, 2023).The main thread of social accountability 3.0 and what distinguishes it from previous generations is a focus on its contribution towards more responsive systems and accountable social contracts. In particular, social accountability should be...

This report addresses the well-recognized evidence gap1 on the longer-term impacts created by marketdriven programming; specifically, programming influenced by market systems development (MSD) principles. It does so by presenting the findings of an ex-post study conducted three and a half years after the close of USAID’s Feed the Future Senegal Naatal Mbay Activity (hereafter Naatal Mbay) in 2019. It examines the scale and sustainability of changes resulting from Naatal Mbay’s introduction...

DT Global is proud to introduce our new Guidance Note: Practical Introduction to Adaptive Management There is a growing consensus around adaptive management as an effective (even necessary) approach when programs are tackling complex development problems. While there is no standard definition of adaptive management, there is general agreement that such programs need to routinely engage with and respond to program context; constantly test what works in that context; and adjust approaches,...

This updated guide provides practical guidance to practitioners in the human rights sector and beyond on how to integrate Applied Political Economy Analysis

What problem is the KRT model trying to solve? For workforces that experience continuous staff turnover, the lack of systematic knowledge transfer can often lead to: - Loss of programmatic momentum, - Duplication of efforts and frustration, and - Wasted time and resources. The Knowledge Retention and Transfer (KRT) model provides tools, processes, and practices to individuals, teams, offices, and organizations to improve knowledge handover, which in turn improves efficiency and programmatic and operational learning.