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Today, nearly one billion people lack electricity, over three billion lack clean water, and 750 million lack basic literacy skills. Many of these challenges could be solved with existing solutions, and technology enables us to reach the last mile like never before. Yet, few solutions attain the necessary scale to match the size of these challenges. Scaling Up Development Impact offers an analytical framework, a set of practical tools, and adaptive evaluation techniques to accompany the...

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...

Criticism that the development sector has not delivered in terms of eliminating extreme poverty, fast-tracking growth and preventing conflict, is neither new nor surprising. In fact, it may be the one thing that scholars, donors and practitioners agree on. While many of these concerns are valid, this book makes a case that the sector is closer to unlocking the gates to more effective and efficient development outcomes than is popularly believed. Specifically, it argues that by overturning a...

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...

World expert Bent Flyvbjerg and bestselling author Dan Gardner reveal the secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious projects on any scale.Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant new reality. Think of how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to an enormously successful product launch in eleven months. But such successes are the exception. Consider how London’s Crossrail project delivered five years late and billions over budget....

This book analyses the shortcomings of the Western development aid programme. Through exploring the evolution of aid over more than seven decades, development is examined as an industry with a variety of motives and actors. The driving forces and dynamics in the relationship between aid and economic development are highlighted in relation to faulty development structures and misaligned aims. With a particular focus on Egypt, radical questions are posed on how global aid and development can...

Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems, particularly for international development initiatives. However, the results of development in conflict contexts have generally been disappointing and their preventative potential thus questionable. Available Open Access, Lives Amid Violence argues that this is because practitioners adhere to a mental model that emphasises linearity, certainty, and causality, assuming that violence is best addressed through work plans that deliver...

The issues of poverty, inequality, racial justice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on industrial models of production and power to "solve" social problems, are not helping. In fact, they are designed to entrench the status quo. In The Systems Work of Social Change, Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici draw on two hundred years of history and a treasure trove of stories of committed social changemakers to uncover...

Technologies are intrinsically social. They reflect human values and affect human behavior. The social dynamics of technology materialize through design features that shape how a technology functions and to what effect. The shaping effects of technology are represented in scholarly fields by the concept of “affordances.” Affordances are the ways design features enable and constrain user engagement and social action. This has been a central construct for designers and technology theorists...

The development co-operation community needs to innovate to meet the global challenges ahead. Although it has an established track record for innovating partnerships, funding instruments and technologies, they are not enough to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals. This report synthesises the lessons emerging from an OECD Development Assistance Committee peer learning exercise on how innovation efforts can be strengthened, individually and collectively, to achieve the 2030 Agenda. The...

There is a growing hunger for more, and more meaningful, citizen participation in decisions that affect our lives. Across the world, calls for open government, workplace democracy, community empowerment are gaining support, as are innovative developments in deliberative democracy. The current COVID-19 pandemic makes these calls more pressing than ever, given the deepening inequalities it has caused and the complex challenges of building a progressive road out of the crisis. So, now more...

Democratic innovations are proliferating in politics, governance, policy, and public administration. These new processes of public participation are reimagining the relationship between citizens and institutions. This Handbook advances understanding of democratic innovations, in theory and practice, by critically reviewing their importance throughout the world. The overarching themes are a focus on citizens and their relationship to these innovations, and the resulting effects on political...

This book uncovers how power operates around the world, and how it can be resisted or transformed through empowered collective action and social leadership. The stakes have never been higher. Recent years have seen a rapid escalation of inequalities, the rise of new global powers and corporate interests, increasing impunity of human rights violations, suppression of civil society, and a re-shaping of democratic processes by post-truth, populist and nationalist politics. Rather than looking...

The Laboratory of Collective Intelligence for Participatory Democracy (2016-2019) is a project that arose out of Medialab Prado in coordination with the Government Area of Citizen Participation, Transparency and Open Government of the city of Madrid. Its work has been very connected with the analysis, reflection and innovation found on the digital participation platform Decide Madrid. The project has also organised many workshops and conferences that have brought together hundreds of people...

Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a synthesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predominant more-is-better paradigm of scaling. For...

The Scale Up Sourcebook is informed and inspired by the September 2018 conference, Innovations in Agriculture: Scaling Up to Reach Millions, organized by Purdue University, in partnership with the African Development Bank. The Sourcebook consolidates, extends, and disseminates some of the scaling insights presented at the Purdue conference. It is intended as an easy-to-use guidebook targeted to a broad and diverse audience of stakeholders associated with scaling agricultural technologies and...

The challenges facing humanitarian logistics are huge. Refugee camps present enormously challenging environments in which sudden spikes in demand, difficult to access locations, disruptions due to conflict or disasters, as well as normal supply chain problems are commonplace. This means that orders for medical and other supplies can take weeks and sometimes months to fulfil, severely impeding humanitarian operations. There is also a lack of or slow adoption of technology routinely used...

Foreign aid is about charity. International development is about technical fixes. At least that is what we, as donor publics, are constantly told. The result is a highly dysfunctional aid system which mistakes short-term results for long-term transformation and gets attacked across the political spectrum, with the right claiming we spend too much, and the left that we don't spend enough. The reality, as Yanguas argues in this highly provocative book, is that aid isn't – or at least...