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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...

In this blog, Arnaldo Pellini, Kristian Paolo Torres, and Tania Dora Warokka reflect on their experience developing and testing a rubric to support dialogue and learning as complex initiatives are integrated into public systems.

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...

The case for Conversation-based reporting (CBR)

There is growing engagement with “relational” approaches to community development work - interventions that give practical or even metaphysical primacy to relations and processes over identities and outcomes. But what more can we say about the nature and efficacy of such approaches? CLARISSA SP+ and WorkFREE were two major relational community development intervention and research projects that took place in Bangladesh and India respectively. In this article, I compare the experiences and...

This blog launches a new co-design toolkit to support the development of services for early years. The co-design toolkit is a practical set of resources created to enable local authorities and communities to design public services together. It has been

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...

Key Points • The authors identified four archetypes describing philanthropic funders’ approach to AI: The Curious, The Doers, The Dreamers, The Skeptics. • The authors did not find major differences across foundations based on their geographic location, though there were differences found based on their mission and values. Feminist and social justice funders in the Global South demonstrated more skepticism than others. • Even in seemingly benign or straightforward applications, AI systems...

Amid growing concerns over sustainable development failures, scholars are exploring the ‘regenerative paradigm’ as a pathway for systemic change; yet, its paradigmatic foundations remain underexamined. Using thematic analysis, we analyse the regenerative knowledge field through an integrative review of 320 cross-disciplinary articles on regenerative approaches, synthesising findings into an interactive Regenerative Paradigm Map with 7 principles, 33 themes, and 253 specific elements. We...

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...

There is philanthropic investing, and there is commercial investing, and there is nothing in between.

“Polycrisis” has become a ubiquitous descriptor for the multisector, intersecting problems afflicting the world—but the term masks the systemic nature of these crises and overwhelmingly reflects Eurocentric voices, priorities, 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.

Critical summary – the single through‑line of the essay

Cooke and Kothari argue that the seductive claims of participation often provide cover for shallow and tokenistic development practices that fail to address unequal power relationships. This paper provides a novel mechanism that documents and enables a three-dimensional analysis of (a) who participates (b) at which project stages and (c) at what level of agency and power. No other mechanism was found in the literature for systematically tracing and analysing changes in power relationship...

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...

By Robert Ricigliano and Anna Muoio

What it takes to create smart velocity