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This learning paper on funding and entrepreneurship support for adaptation and resilience is a collaboration between SILP and the Climate Adaptation Innovation & Learning Initiative project. It brings together real-world insights from a community of 25 practitioners working across intermediary roles in the climate adaptation and resilience sector. Rather than presenting a fixed model, the paper explores how intermediaries operate in the “in-between spaces”, navigating tensions between...

Despite widespread endorsement of locally led development, donor agencies still struggle to translate local agency into cumulative change. Donor discourse increasingly emphasises localisation and community leadership, yet operational arrangements remain structured around upward compliance. The practical question is how local agency and institutional accountability can work together so that locally generated insights lead the way while portfolio coherence is maintained. This paper examines a...

This supplemental guide offers practical advice for thinking and working politically (TWP) when practicing the Conservation Standards. The CS are a widely used, systematic approach for planning, monitoring, and adapting programs aiming to conserve biodiversity. TWP is an approach to international development that brings greater attunement to the political dynamics of the local programming context in order to enhance development results. Given strong evidence that political factors...

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...

The Digital Justice Network produced a guide that originated from the realisation that civil society organisations and activists need help in establishing generative AI policies and properly utilise these tools when necessary. “Some of our activists are drafting statements with ChatGPT, and I’m worried about what approach we should take.” Many organisations are likely having similar concerns. With the emergence of various generative AI services—such as chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, and...

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.

Pando Funding is a practical, principle-based approach to pooling and deploying capital to support a system change network—collaborations of diverse actors working across strategies, sectors, and theories of change to shift a complex system for the better. A system change network brings together leaders, helps them develop a shared vision for transformational change, and shifts decision-making into their hands so they can adapt and innovate in response to emerging developments on the...

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...

In 2022, the Democracy Funders Network launched the Better Futures Project and published Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy to urge democracy donors and practitioners to move beyond reaction and critique towards creation and change. The project seeks to provide succor and inspiration at a time marked by anxiety and fear, but also great possibility. The project challenges us to consider the future of our democracy as a dynamic system — not one that revolves solely around the next...

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...