Your search
Results 35 resources
-
How and to what degree is the World Bank putting its new institutional citizen engagement (CE) commitments into practice? This question guides an independent assessment that the Accountability Research Center (ARC) at American University has undertaken as part of the Institute of Development Studies-led Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme’s investigation into how external actors can best support local processes of and conditions for empowerment and...
-
As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering,...
-
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...
-
Calls for more ‘adaptive programming’ have been prominent in international development practice for over a decade. Learning-by-doing is a crucial element of this, but programmes have often found it challenging to become more learning oriented. Establishing some form of reflective practice, against countervailing incentives, is difficult. Incorporating data collection processes that generate useful, timely and practical information to inform these reflections is even more so.This paper...
-
The Method Positive Deviance (PD) is based on the observation that in every community or organization, there are a few individuals who achieve significantly better outcomes than their peers, despite having similar challenges and resources. These individuals are referred to as positive deviants, and adopting their solutions is what is referred to as the PD approach¹. The method described in this Handbook follows the same logic as the PD approach but uses pre-existing, non-traditional data...
-
The positive deviance approach in international development scales practices and strategies of positively-deviant individuals and groups: those who are able to achieve significantly better development outcomes than their peers despite having similar resources and challenges. This approach relies mainly on traditional data sources (e.g. surveys and interviews) for identifying those positive deviants and for discovering their successful solutions. The growing availability of non-traditional...
-
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...
-
This case study describes how LASER has gone about enabling systemic change and sustainable uptake of reforms that address complex institutional problems in Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somaliland and Uganda. In each of these countries LASER has designed-in a sustainable approach from the start based on: (i) local ownership and leadership of reforms based on developing country (rather than donor) priorities; (ii) use of country (rather than donor programme) systems; and (iii) an...
-
Global health donors increasingly embrace international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) as partners, often relying on them to conduct political advocacy in recipient countries, especially in controversial policy domains like reproductive health. Although INGOs are the primary recipients of donor funding, they are expected to work through national affiliates or counterparts to enable ‘locally-led’ change. Using prospective policy analysis and ethnographic evidence, this paper examines...
-
Many education systems in low- and middle-income countries are experiencing a learning crisis. Many efforts to address this crisis do not account for the system features of education, meaning that they fail to consider the ways that interactions and feedback loops produce outcomes. Thinking through the feedback relationships that produce the education system can be challenging. The RISE Education Systems Framework, which is sufficiently structured to give boundaries to the analysis but...
-
Pressure is mounting on international development cooperation agencies to prove the impact of their work. Private and public commissioners as well as the general public are increasingly asking for robust evidence of impact. In this context, rigorous impact evaluation (RIE) methods are increasingly receiving attention within the broader German development system and in GIZ. Compared to other implementing agencies such as DFID or USAid, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale...
-
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...
-
Diverse approaches to promoting disability inclusive employment aim to transform workplaces into truly inclusive environments, usually with intervention strategies targeting two main groups: employers and jobseekers with disabilities. However, they do not always consider other relevant stakeholders or address the relationships and interactions between diverse actors in the wider social ecosystem. These approaches often neglect deeper ‘vexing’ difficulties which block progress towards...
-
Meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require adapting or redirecting a variety of very complex global and local human systems. It is essential that development scholars and practitioners have tools to understand the dynamics of these systems and the key drivers of their behavior, such as barriers to progress and leverage points for driving sustainable change. System dynamics tools are well suited to address this challenge, but they must first be adapted for...
Explore
Theme
-
Geography
-
Africa
-
Eastern Africa
- Ethiopia (1)
- Kenya (6)
- Malawi (3)
- Mozambique (8)
- Rwanda (3)
- Somalia (6)
- Somaliland (1)
- South Sudan (3)
- Tanzania (5)
- Uganda (6)
- Zambia (1)
- Zimbabwe (4)
-
Central Africa
(1)
- Angola (1)
- Northern Africa (3)
-
Southern Africa
(1)
- South Africa (1)
-
West Africa
(13)
- Benim (1)
- Mali (1)
- Niger (3)
- Nigeria (6)
- Sierra Leone (2)
-
Eastern Africa
-
Americas
(8)
-
Central America
(5)
- Ecuador (3)
- El Salvador (1)
- Guatemala (2)
- Mexico (4)
-
North America
(1)
- Canada (1)
- United States of America (1)
- South America (4)
-
Central America
(5)
-
Asia
(13)
- South-eastern Asia (7)
-
Southern Asia
(8)
- Bangladesh (2)
- India (1)
- Nepal (1)
- Pakistan (5)
- Sri Lanka (1)
-
Western Asia
(2)
- Israel (1)
- Jordan (1)
- Lebanon (1)
- State of Palestine (1)
-
Europe
(2)
-
Eastern Europe
(1)
- Ukraine (1)
- Western Europe (2)
-
Eastern Europe
(1)
-
Africa
-
Adaptive Approaches [+]
(26)
- Adaptive Learning (2)
- Adaptive Management (16)
- Adaptive Rigour (1)
- MSD - Market Systems Development (1)
- Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (1)
- PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation) (1)
- Positive Deviance & 2 loops model (1)
- Results Based Management (1)
- Systems Thinking / Complexity (4)
- TWP (Thinking & Working Politically) (1)
- Cases (20)
-
Development Actors Perspectives
(10)
- China (1)
- FCDO/DFID (UK) (2)
- GIZ (Germany) (3)
- Irish Aid (1)
- NGO Perspectives (1)
- UNDP, UN Global Pulse, UN... (2)
- USAID (1)
- World Bank (2)
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
(17)
- After Action Reviews (1)
- Case Study (1)
- Contribution Analysis (1)
- Critical Friends (1)
- Impact evaluation (2)
- Impact Oriented Monitoring and Evaluation System (1)
- Knowing Unknowns (1)
- MEL in International Development (3)
- Outcome Harvesting (1)
- Portfolio Management (1)
- Positive Deviance (2)
- Process Tracing (1)
- Rigour (1)
- Strategy testing (1)
- Systemic Change (2)
- Systems Mapping (1)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (1)
- Value for Money (3)
-
Practical
(4)
- Tools (1)
-
Sectors [+]
(22)
- Agriculture (2)
- Alternative Development (2)
- Citizen Engagement (1)
- Economic development (1)
- Education (2)
- Employment (1)
- Fragile and Conflict Aflicted Settings (3)
- Gender (3)
- Governance and Accountability (7)
- Inclusion/Disability (1)
- Institutional Capacity & Change (1)
- Knowledge to Practice (1)
- Locally driven development (2)
- NGOs (1)
- Peace Building (2)
- Social Accountability (3)
Resource type
- Blog Post (1)
- Book (1)
- Book Section (1)
- Journal Article (7)
- Report (24)
- Thesis (1)