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Healthy Cities for Adolescents Phase II (HCA-II) is a multi-country programme that supports projects working to improve adolescent and young people’s health and wellbeing in intermediary cities. Guided by the principle of shifting the status quo, with adolescents at the centre of this, HCA-II aims to catalyse meaningful changes in how cities function for young people. This guide aims to help you influence the systems that shape adolescent and young people’s health and wellbeing in the...

While enthusiasm for systems change has grown steadily over the past decade, we find a significant gap persists between this enthusiasm and execution. Funders attempting to implement systems change consistently face 9 challenges, including unclear outcome attribution, long commitment horizons, and complex stakeholder coordination. When faced with these challenges, it is understandable why many funders find themselves defaulting to patching the system rather than changing it. The pressures...

Today’s critical challenges are complex and require system level change. Issues like ending poverty, reversing biodiversity collapse, creating more equitable and sustainable food systems, or ending health inequalities, will not respond to neat siloed technical interventions. These are not problems we can tackle head on. Rather, we need to change the conditions (systems) that create these problems. Consequently, many of the most ambitious philanthropic foundations are adopting ‘systems...

Pando Funding is a practical, principle-based approach to pooling and deploying capital to support a system change network—collaborations of diverse actors working across strategies, sectors, and theories of change to shift a complex system for the better. A system change network brings together leaders, helps them develop a shared vision for transformational change, and shifts decision-making into their hands so they can adapt and innovate in response to emerging developments on the...

The aim of this paper is to highlight several frameworks that changemakers can employ to assist them in thinking about, planning, and evaluating their efforts to change or transform systems. The paper is based on the idea that changemakers may have an easier time getting on the same page about what they are trying to accomplish if they have some common language about the different degrees, orders, or levels of change they seek. The paper goes further in exploring different types of change...

This foundation paper introduces the core ideas behind systems transformation and summarizes the most current thinking about how deep, structural change actually unfolds. It integrates insights from systems science, social innovation, sustainability transitions, and evaluation to clarify the mechanisms, patterns, and conditions that distinguish transformative change from more incremental forms of improvement. Designed as an accessible primer, it helps change-makers build a shared...

A tool to deepen your understanding of the status quo, envision desirable futures, and engage with ecosystems more intentionally.

A living library of practical tools, frameworks, and case studies designed to support practitioners in complex collaborations. Many-to-Many System -aims to support collaborations tackling complex, entangled challenges where disrupting norms and values, ownership, and power is essential. Solving today’s complex, interconnected problems requires what we term “complex collaborations” - bringing together many diverse groups (public, private, civic) with many new perspectives, including future...

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...

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...

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...

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...