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In 2016, the Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL) commissioned an internal stocktaking of USAID's mission-based MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning) Platforms.

In Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin water reform has been contentious as government attempts to reconcile historical over allocation of water to irrigation with the use of water for environmental outcomes. However, in many aspects, scientific knowledge of the environment is either imperfect, incomplete or environmental responses are unpredictable, with this uncertainty preventing definitive policy and closure of political arguments. In response to uncertainty and knowledge gaps, adaptive...

The Open Government Partnership (OGP), donors and multilaterals, and social accountability practitioners across the world are among various constituencies attempting to harness and actualise emerging insights about the nature of successful governance reform. But each of these groups faces challenges as they do so. This brief reviews the evidence from Learning to Make All Voices Count (L-MAVC), a programme funded by Making All Voices Count, and implemented in collaboration with Global...

Our experience and research demonstrate that successful agile organizations consistently exhibit the five trademarks described in this article. The trademarks include a network of teams within a people-centered culture that operates in rapid learning and fast decision cycles which are enabled by technology, and a common purpose that co-creates value for all stakeholders. These trademarks complement the findings from The McKinsey Global Survey Results: How to create an agile organization.

Fifteen to twenty years is how long it takes for the billions of dollars of health-related research to translate into evidence-based policies and programs suitable for public use. Over the past 15 years, an exciting science has emerged that seeks to narrow the gap between the discovery of new knowledge and its application in public health, mental health, and health care settings. Dissemination and implementation (D&I) research seeks to understand how to best apply scientific advances in the...

On March 11, 2011, overwhelming and incomprehensible disaster struck the northeast coast of Japan. Life for those in the region would never be the same. This book is about the awakening that follows disaster. About the minutes and months and years that come after now. It is about what happens when we're smacked on the side of the head and open our eyes, startled out of the trance in which we have been living our days. It is about the opportunities always present, often invisible, to create...

In recent years, more and more influential development organisations have been openly recognising the central role that adaptive management capacities – the ability to keep improving strategies and actions as programmes unfold – play for the success of complex interventions. As a result, there has been a rich exchange of ideas and experiences on how to promote adaptiveness in development. But development organisations and professionals are having a hard time translating the many adaptive...

Is there a new Washington Consensus? Alice Evans analyses the last five World Development Reports and finds significant changes in orthodoxy, but also big gaps

For over 40years, scenarios have been promoted as a key technique for forming strategies in uncertain environments. However, many challenges remain. In this article, we discuss a novel approach designed to increase the applicability of scenario-based strategizing in top management teams. Drawing on behavioural strategy as a theoretical lens, we design a yardstick to study the impact of scenario-based strategizing. We then describe our approach, which includes developing scenarios and...

Essential points for practitioners and donors • Mediation offers a cost-effective and proven method for resolving armed conflict. Between 1985 and 2015, 75 per cent of armed conflicts in the world were resolved through agreement rather than by force. In most cases these processes will have involved third party facilitation or support. • Professional mediators understand the high stakes involved in their work to prevent, mitigate and resolve armed conflict. In addition, they and their...

Making tech effective - building on what we already know

This interview protocol was used for a research project on adaptiveness in technology for governance initiatives in Kenya. For more information, please read the research report at: Prieto Martin, P.; Hernandez, K.; Faith, B. and Ramalingam, B. (2017) Doing Digital Development Differently: Lessons in adaptive management from technology for governance initiatives in Kenya, MAVC Research Report, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, ids.ac.uk/project/making-all-voices-count

Development projects don’t always work as planned. This has long been acknowledged by those in the sector, and has led to several approaches that seek to solve complex development problems through enabling and encouraging greater adaptiveness and learning within projects (e.g. Doing Development Differently and Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation). Digital development projects experience many of these issues. Using technology for transparency and accountability (Tech4T&A) projects in Kenya as...

Eighteen practices for organizational agility The survey asked respondents about a series of specific actions that underlie each of the 18 practices (9 of them stable, and 9 dynamic) of organizational agility; all of the practices are summarized in the table below. To rate respondents’ organizations, we asked how frequently their performance units engaged in each action that supports a given practice.

Extreme Teaming Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership Today’s global enterprises increasingly involve collaborative work by teams of experts operating across different professions, organizations, and industries. Extreme Teaming provides new insights into the world of complex, cross industry projects and the ways they must be managed. Leading experts Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey analyze contemporary cases that expose the complex demands of cross-boundary collaboration on...

This paper presents an analysis of evidence from seven case studies of results-based management by development co-operation providers. Analysis of themes from the case studies reveal six interrelated challenges which providers face in their efforts to manage for the results of development co-operation. The six challenges are: linking results to development goals, ensuring the purpose of results systems is well-defined, weighing up the benefits of aggregating and attributing results from...