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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...

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...

Many readers recognise and understand that complex is about as simple as it gets for major policy and management. This guide is for those unwilling in the Anthropocene to shrink back into the older platitudes about ‘keep it simple’ and ‘not to worry, we’ll scale up the analysis later on’. This guide offers key concepts, methods, counternarratives, and analogies that recast major policy and management issues in ways that do not deny their complexity but help render them more tractable for action.

Addressing 21st century development challenges requires investments in innovation, including the use of new approaches and technologies. Currently, many development organisations prioritise investments in isolated innovation pilots that leverage a specific approach or technology rather than pursuing a strategic approach to expand the organisation’s toolbox with innovations that have proven their comparative advantage over what is currently used. This Working Paper addresses this challenge of...

Nearly all challenges in international development tend to be complex because they depend on constantly evolving human behaviour, systems, and contexts, involving multiple actors, entities, and processes. As a result, both the discovery and scaling of innovations to address challenges in development often involve changes in system behaviour or even system-level transformation. This is rarely a linear process over time and can result in unexpected outcomes. Existing evaluation techniques...

So you have just hear about systems thinking and systems innovation and are keen to know more, Ok sparky let's get started.We have structured all the content into four main areas that we think you ...

Over the last 15 years the concept of scale has become a foundational part of the apparatus of the social and environmental change sector. A business mindset of growth has been seamlessly transferred to the social and environmental problems we are collectively trying to shift in the world. Scaling up, (influencing policy) has been considered the strategic pathway to systems change. Scaling out (spreading new models) is seen as a pathway to success. The allure of these scaling theories lies,...

Systems thinking approaches are gaining traction as an effective way of understanding and working with increasing complexity. They are being put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as well as the World Health Organisation as a way to tackle the complex and unpredictable environments we now operate in. As the world has become increasingly interconnected, national or local boundaries cannot isolate and control social problems. The climate emergency, war and...

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.

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...

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...

This systems change rubric describes different performance levels according to various systems elements, such as policy (formal rules), practices and relationships and connections. Programmes can use the rubric to assess the performance of systems to help decide where and how to intervene, or during and post-implementation to conduct progress assessments, and assess the effectiveness of interventions and type, breadth and depth of systems change. Each performance level description...

A step-by-step guide on how to develop a Transformative Theory of Change, for innovation projects, programmes and organisations working on systems transformation. The MOTION project was initiated with one key question in mind: how can we help projects and organisations be more transformative, using the framework and concept provided by the multi-level perspective? And what kind of tools, methods and frameworks can we co-design that translate scientific concepts into practises relevant for...

This paper presents the case for systemic organisational change in the humanitarian system. The paper firstly shows that that organisational learning has tended to reinforce existing ways of working and has not been able to shift a culture that values action over reflection. As a result, the rest of the paper asks about the most significant changes in the humanitarian sector

Capturing the impact of community-led work The Centre for Public Impact, Dusseldorp Forum, and Hands Up Mallee have been exploring how stories can be used to more effectively communicate the impact of community-led systems change work. Community-led place based initiatives are modelling new ways of working - shifting away from top down, program-focussed approaches towards an approach grounded in systems thinking and community-led innovations. However, while these stories of change are...

This document is a an Introductory Toolkit for for civil servants. It is one component of a suite of documents that aims to act as a springboard into systems thinking for civil servants unfamiliar with this approach. These documents introduce a small sample of systems thinking concepts and tools, chosen due to their accessibility and alignment to civil service policy development, but which is by no means comprehensive. They are intended to act as a first step towards using systems thinking...