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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...

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...

The Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) programme was a three-year initiative funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) that brought together 20 projects from across the global South to understand the socioeconomic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, improve existing responses, and generate better policy options for recovery. The research covered 42 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to understand the ways in which the pandemic...

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...

Foreign aid and international development frequently bring with it a range of unintended consequences, both negative and positive. This book delves into these consequences, providing a fresh and comprehensive guide to understanding and addressing them. The book starts by laying out a theoretical framework based on complexity thinking, before going on to explore the ten most prevalent kinds of unintended effects of foreign aid: backlash effects, conflict effects, migration and resettlement...

Responses to sustainability challenges are not delivering results at the scale and speed called for by science, international agreements, and concerned citizens. Yet there is a tendency to underestimate the large-scale impacts of small-scale, local, and contextualized actions, and particularly the role of individuals in scaling transformations. Here, we explore a fractal approach to scaling sustainability transformations based on “universal values.” Universal values are proposed as intrinsic...

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...

For AC practitioners, systems mapping is essential but also difficult. To lessen obstacles, Peter Woodrow proposes a scaffolded approach. An Experiment in “Fast Forwarding” Drawing upon our near-decade work on corruption, we recently decided to try an experiment: we would present “common patterns” of corruption as tentative models to adapt and add to—rather than try to teach people to do systems mapping from scratch. In this teaching experiment, each common pattern would function as a kind...

Check out this video to see what’s inside our new resource: Practitioners' Guidance to Assessing Systems Change, developed by MEL Managers for MEL Managers. (Check out the Guidance here https://bit.ly/MSPMELClinics.) Hear from the authors about which parts they love the most and how this guide challenges MEL managers to assess systems change as an ongoing aspect of implementation, generating feedback that teams need to better understand and catalyze change, for more impact.

DT Global is proud to introduce our new Guidance Note: Practical Introduction to Adaptive Management There is a growing consensus around adaptive management as an effective (even necessary) approach when programs are tackling complex development problems. While there is no standard definition of adaptive management, there is general agreement that such programs need to routinely engage with and respond to program context; constantly test what works in that context; and adjust approaches,...

The world changes too much for anyone who is invested in social change work to imagine that this work is linear and predictable. Opportunities come and go, whether caused by a pandemic or political shifts. This much most social movement leaders and activists intuitively understand. But what can be done with this realization? How might movement groups better prepare for moments of opportunity? We want to explore how we can create the changes we want to see by responding to the changes that are outside our control.

A resource designed to help organisations, teams and individuals manage innovation journeys responsibly and successfully. We have partnered with MIT D-Lab to develop a new resource to drive greater diversity and inclusion within project design and implementation. The Participation for Humanitarian Innovation (PfHI) toolkit sets out a robust approach to setting expectations for and monitoring the degree of participation within research and innovation projects for, with, and by people...

A resource designed to help organisations, teams and individuals manage innovation journeys responsibly and successfully. We have partnered with MIT D-Lab to develop a new resource to drive greater diversity and inclusion within project design and implementation. The Participation for Humanitarian Innovation (PfHI) toolkit sets out a robust approach to setting expectations for and monitoring the degree of participation within research and innovation projects for, with, and by people...

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...

How can donors and grantees work together to create effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) practices that drive field-wide transformation?

The complexity of issues addressed by research for development (R4D) requires collaborations between partners from a range of disciplines and cultural contexts. Power asymmetries within such partnerships may obstruct the fair distribution of resources, responsibilities and benefits across all partners. This paper presents a cross-case analysis of five R4D partnership evaluations, their methods and how they unearthed and addressed power asymmetries. It contributes to the field of R4D...

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...

There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today which must change.Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies' reliance on companies such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown.The 'Big Con' describes the confidence trick the...