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Citizens' assemblies and other democratic innovations are spreading around the world. But they do not spread by themselves. Behind every successful scaling story sits a constellation of organisations doing the essential, often invisible work of building capacity, establishing networks, advocating with decision makers, and ensuring quality standards. These are what we call scaling catalysts: organisations that intentionally drive the expansion of democratic innovations in their regions. In...

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...

This paper shares an insider's perspective on the spread of Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) across the US Agency for International Development (USAID), highlighting lessons learned along the way that are relevant even beyond the dissolution of the Agency in 2025.

Generative AI (GenAI) is evolving rapidly, and its use in violence against women research remains new and largely experimental. While researchers are beginning to explore GenAI’s potential, uncertainty around its risks, ethical challenges, and real-world application persists. Recognising the need for clear guidance, the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) partnered with The MERL Tech Initiative (MTI) to develop this resource. This guide aims to provide background on GenAI, strengthen...

Relational state capacity (RSC) integrates the quality of citizen-state relationships into the concept of state capacity, emphasizing mutual recognition between citizens and state agents as foundational for societal problem-solving. Traditional state capacity definitions overemphasize technical and institutional elements, overlooking relational dynamics. RSC is a latent societal resource activated through mutual recognition in citizen-state exchanges with potential to improve outcomes across...

Introduction Phase 1 - Power Up Phase 2 - Level Up

In an evolving international development landscape, the push for localization has gained urgency. Global South Intermediary Organizations (GSIs) are emerging as key players, offering a promising pathway to achieving localization programming. To harness their potential, it is crucial to develop a deeper understanding of their functions, structures, and strategies. However, they should complement—not replace—direct funding relationships with grassroots organizations. The Trust,...

Government offices are filled with siloed, sector-specific digital systems that strain their capacity to make decisions, use data effectively, and achieve ambitious sustainable development goals. Public investments in digital development, transformation, and infrastructure can only meet citizen needs if data and systems are consolidated and interoperable. While interoperability is a sensible approach to building digital public infrastructure, transforming existing systems is easier said...

After eight years, I am leaving Porticus. From January 2025, I'll be starting a new chapter - working in a freelance capacity to support systems change efforts through strong learning, evaluation and strategy. Having worked with the amazing Porticus UK team for the first four years, I moved to Amsterdam in 2020 to work in the central strategy and learning team, supporting colleagues around the globe to embed strategy, evaluation and learning in their work. I loved this work. I learned a...

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...

This five-step framework, developed and tested by a foundation, embeds learning in emergent systems change strategies. It prioritizes the testing of hypotheses and assumptions, uses learning questions, and calls for examining both confirming and disconfirming evidence. --- A framework for embedding learning in systems change strategies and for testing strategic uncertainties. Learning and evaluation approaches that accompany systems change efforts need to fit with and support the emergent...

The Reduced Access Analytical Methods (RAAM) toolkit is a practical resource designed to help humanitarian practitioners overcome monitoring challenges in reduced access environments. Reduced access can be caused by natural disaster, conflict, political instability, or other factors, and typically makes it difficult to conduct normal monitoring of program implementation. The RAAM toolkit offers technical and managerial tools for a menu of analytical methods that can fill information gaps...

Over the course of this paper we lay out the basis of the Carve-Out method, an approach that leverages a behavioural framework to allow organisations (even those burdened with layers of bureaucracy and entrenched ideas) to create intentionally designed environments that give people the space, resources and support they need to explore and test new ideas. Ideas that may go on to transform the core of their organisation. The Carve-Out method is based on a simple insight: That if we want to...

Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) is an evidence and innovation-generation programme funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), responding to the challenge of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL) in Bangladesh and Nepal. It is a challenge characterised by a poor understanding of its drivers and a lack of evidence on what works to combat it. To handle such fundamental uncertainty, the programme adopts a...

Digital innovations are constantly redefining the boundaries of what is possible and, therefore, bring with them many challenges: it is important for organisations to scale impactful solutions and bring about positive change on a global level – a scaling toolkit is designed to help with this. With the Scaling Toolkit, a healthcare organisation, for example, can scale a digital health monitoring system, adapt it to the local language, and integrate it seamlessly into existing infrastructure....

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...

When social accountability interventions scale up and their sustainability depends on the interactions of many agents and system components, related results are rarely observable at the end of an intervention. The 2019 OECD Development Assistance Committee’s (OECD DAC) revamped evaluations criteria for assessing sustainability acknowledges that such results are often emergent, and should be monitored and evaluated with this in mind. It therefore emphasizes a turn towards assessing complex...

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...