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Most development practitioners have long recognized that deep contextual knowledge is crucial to understanding how projects interact with their local systems and, in turn, to navigating these systems. Moreover, this knowledge must complement projects' technical solutions, or they will fall flat and may even undercut project objectives as they clatter down. What, then, explains practitioners' particular interest in TWP as an explicit strategy and more than just "doing good development"? This...

If you just remember these... If you can avoid building it, don’t build it; if you have to build it, hire a CTO, ship early, and mature long; and no matter what, draw on a trusted crew, build lean and fast, and get close to and build with your users as soon as possible. --- This guide aims to help you avoid bad projects, structure the team right, ship and learn quicker, and mature longer. The guide starts with project selection, including why the best project to select is no project at...

This thesis applies ideational and institutional theories to analyse how two specific ideas, results and adaptation, have changed the theory and practice of development cooperation. The thesis addresses the question of why the results and adaptation ideas are often treated as binaries and how this debate has evolved historically. In a first theoretical paper, the evolution of results and adaptation is conceptualised as a combination of institutional layering and diffusion within development...

The CLARISSA Social Protection Intervention was set us as an innovative social policy intervention for tackling social ills, with a...

Effective public service delivery begins with knowing whether the services offered are working as intended. We launched a system to enable citizen input on the delivery of public services.

Since the beginning of reforms in the late 1970s, China has developed rapidly, transforming itself into a middle-income country, raising hundreds of millions out of poverty and, latterly, developing broad-based social protection systems. The country’s approach to reform has been unorthodox, leading many to talk of a specific Chinese model of development. This paper analyses the role of innovation (chuangxin) and experimentation in the Chinese government repertoire and their contribution to...

There are increasing criticisms of dominant models for scaling up health systems in developing countries and a recognition that approaches are needed that better take into account the complexity of health interventions. Since Reform and Opening in the late 1970s, Chinese government has managed complex, rapid and intersecting reforms across many policy areas. As with reforms in other policy areas, reform of the health system has been through a process of trial and error. There is increasing...

Sarah Hurcombe shares what she's learning from the public service revolution building momentum in Europe.

The theme of learning from experience as a means of improving the effectiveness of rural development projects and programmers has been common in recent years. Considerable effort has been put into refining, monitoring and evaluation systems to enhance organizational learning processes. However, an emphasis on normative approaches to evaluation and learning from experience has led to the neglect of research into the actual processes by which rural development agencies utilize experience. The...

How have local governments in China been able to break through central policy restrictions in a unitary and authoritarian political system? Why is China's official discourse in the reform era often so conservative and unfavorable to reform? The author argues the two issues are components of a signaling game between China's central government and local officials, in which local officials know that the center may be reformist, but the reformist center imitates the rhetoric of a conservative...

Motivation In the last decade, a movement formed around making aid delivery more adaptive, relying on principles such as context sensitivity, flexibility, and ownership. The approaches seem promising for civil society organizations (CSOs) to fulfil their mission of fostering social transformation. While several donor agencies have started engaging with such approaches, the authors hardly see their political implications in practice. Purpose The article aims to provide evidence on an adaptive...

The world faces converging crises of health, climate, gender and racial injustice and extreme economic inequality. The calls are mounting to ‘build back better’ to create more inclusive, caring and environmentally sustainable futures. But what evidence exists that this is possible? The Inspiring Better Futures case study series investigates whether radical change at scale is possible and how it was achieved. This paper synthesises 18 cases which show that people are already successfully...

Adaptive Management involves a dynamic interaction between three elements: delivery, programming and governance. This case study focuses on a large DfID governance project, the Institutions for Inclusive Development (I4ID), a five-year initiative in Tanzania. The study forms part of a research project to examine whether and how adaptive approaches can strengthen aid projects promoting empowerment and accountability in fragile, conflict and violence-affected settings (FCVAS). The research...

Executive Summary When Christian Aid (CA) Ireland devised its multi-country and multi-year Irish Aid funded Programme Grant II (2017-2022), they opted to move away from a linear programme management approach and to explore an adaptive one. Across seven countries: Angola, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, CA and partner organisations support marginalised communities to realise their rights, reduce violence and address...

NGO-IDEAs (NGO – Impact on Development, Empowerment and Actions) NGO-IDEAs is a cooperation of about 40 non-govermental organisations (NGOs) from South Asia, East Africa and the Philippines and 14 German NGOs working in the field of development cooperation. It identifies and develops jointly with all partners, concepts and tools for NGOs in the areas of Outcome and Impact Assessment and Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E). NGO-IDEAs is further being supported by VENRO, the umbrella organisation of...

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...

Development, it is generally assumed, is good and necessary, and in its name the West has intervened, implementing all manner of projects in the impoverished regions of the world. When these projects fail, as they do with astonishing regularity, they nonetheless produce a host of regular and unacknowledged effects, including the expansion of bureaucratic state power and the translation of the political realities of poverty and powerlessness into "technical" problems awaiting solution by...