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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...

Explore Climate KIC’s S-ToC guide A practical and flexible resource designed to help teams and partners navigate the complexity of systems change in the face of the climate crisis. Our S-ToC approach integrates systems thinking to support adaptive monitoring, evaluation, and ongoing learning. This guide empowers users to analyse systems, identify leverage points, and co-create change-oriented strategies that evolve with context. Whether you’re working on a small-scale pilot or a...

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...

Based on a case study of the Kullana Liltanmia (All of Us for Development) (KLP) Contextual Analysis (CA) course in Sudan, this paper tells the story of how training and capacity building in Political Economy Analysis (PEA) made a difference in the lives and experiences of those involved, including in particular young people. The paper highlights three critical lessons: • At the country level, the twists and turns of Sudan’s recent history reinforce the importance of people deepening their...

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...

The Local Systems Position Paper describes the key approaches USAID will use to translate systems thinking into systems practice. It focuses on ways USAID can better understand and engage local systems to support them in producing more sustainable results. Systems thinking is a mindset and set of tools that we use to understand how systems behave and produce certain results or outcomes. Systems practice is the application of systems thinking to better understand challenges and strengthen the...

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...

How moving from transactional to transformational relationships and organizations can save our democracy, nurture our connections, and make us happier and healthier. Powerful institutions, from schools to tech and social media companies, create breeding grounds for isolation by failing to invest in relational work. This obstacle stands in the way of our fight for racial equity, economic justice, and climate resilience. In Relationality, leading asexuality and relationship activist David...

By Robert Ricigliano and Anna Muoio

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...

With growing evidence of what works in education, governments and their partners strive towards scale. While implementation research to adapt solutions holds promise for testing what works, where and for whom, its use in education is limited. Sixty-three international education stakeholders from government, academia, think tanks, local and international non-governmental organizations, multi- and bi-laterals and foundations offer insight into three modes of implementation research that differ...

Evaluation has a long history of using experimental and quasi-experimental designs to measure the effects of programs and strategies, and through this, to infer causality. Yet, these approaches are often not appropriate when evaluating change in complex, dynamic systems. Further, programs and strategies that seek to produce change in complex settings are increasingly common. This leads to an evaluation dilemma: if and how do evaluators attend to causality amid complexity? Too often, the...

Exploring two systems change mental models in philanthropy [ https://evaluationinnovation.org/publication/systems-mental-models/ ] it is an increasingly shared truth: If we want to tackle society’s worst problems, we must bring a systems lens to our social change efforts. We define “systems change” here as the practice of confronting the causes of social problems rather than treating their symptoms. Many in philanthropy are taking this stance, and are shaping their portfolios, strategies,...

Reflecting Forewords is an unashamedly ambitious book. Full of lessons from the past that are relevant for the future, it is a compilation of inspiring forewords from books written by Robert Chambers; one of the most influential and prolific scholars to write about participation, poverty, and knowledge in development studies. Tessa Lewin, Robert’s colleague and an experienced practitioner and researcher, has worked with Robert to weave together the forewords alongside a series of reflections...

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...

Discover the future of organizational structure with the Platform Organization Manifesto. Our guiding principles provide a blueprint for dynamic, adaptable businesses designed to thrive in a constantly changing marketplace. Harness the power of entrepreneurial spirit, cooperation, innovation, and key design principles to empower corporate evolution.

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...