Your search
Results 42 resources
-
How can donors and grantees work together to create effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) practices that drive field-wide transformation?
-
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.
-
Achieving impact through research for development programmes (R4D) requires engagement with diverse stakeholders across the research, development and policy divides. Understanding how such programmes support the emergence of outcomes, therefore, requires a focus on the relational aspects of engagement and collaboration. Increasingly, evaluation of large research collaborations is employing social network analysis (SNA), making use of its relational view of causation. In this paper, we use...
-
Large publicly funded programmes of research continue to receive increased investment as interventions aiming to produce impact for the world’s poorest and most marginalized populations. At this intersection of research and development, research is expected to contribute to complex processes of societal change. Embracing a co-produced view of impact as emerging along uncertain causal pathways often without predefined outcomes calls for innovation in the use of complexity-aware approaches to...
-
The conversation on adaptive management has grown fast amongst development actors. These conversations often focus on designing, commissioning, and managing large-scale development programmes. Exactly how this impacts the frontline, the implementers, and day-to-day project delivery is still being debated. Yet, perspectives drawn directly from practice are often largely missing within these debates. This paper is written by two development practitioners. Through this paper, we reflect on the...
-
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...
-
The United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) aimed to address global challenges to achieve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals through 12 interdisciplinary research hubs. This research documents key lessons learned around working with Theory of Change (ToC) to guide Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) within these complex research for development hubs. Interviews and document reviews were conducted in ten of the research...
-
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...
-
How can donors and grantees work together to create effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) practices that drive field-wide transformation? The Open Society Foundation’s Fiscal Governance Program found success by focusing on six key approaches, including empowering grantees and relinquishing power. In 2021, an external close-out evaluation by Intention to Impact of the program (which ran for 7 years and gave over $150 million in grants) revealed something pretty remarkable—the...
-
Scholarly attention in innovation in the public sector is growing rapidly, provoking analytical complexity. We developed a systematic literature review about Public Sector Innovation (PSI), analysing 169 articles published between 2001 and 2021, using PRISMA. We present a comprehensive approach to PSI testing and empirically develop an analytical framework based on the most common combinations of the studied dimensions. Additionally, we propose three main research avenues for the future of...
-
The idea that technologies can change moral beliefs and practices is an old one. But how, exactly, does this happen? This paper builds on an emerging field of inquiry by developing a synoptic taxonomy of the mechanisms of techno-moral change. It argues that technology affects moral beliefs and practices in three main domains: decisional (how we make morally loaded decisions), relational (how we relate to others) and perceptual (how we perceive situations). It argues that across these three...
-
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....
-
Collaborative Learning — an approach which brings together people who face common challenges to share knowledge and jointly problem-solve — is a powerful way to support locally-led development and achieve impact. It provides a structured process in which change agents determine priorities, set the learning agenda, work together to identify strategies to address complex challenges, and provide ongoing implementation support to one another. Collaborative Learning — unlike traditional...
-
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...
-
Over the last 15 years the concept of scale has become a foundational part of the apparatus of the social and environmental change sector. A business mindset of growth has been seamlessly transferred to the social and environmental problems we are collectively trying to shift in the world. Scaling up, (influencing policy) has been considered the strategic pathway to systems change. Scaling out (spreading new models) is seen as a pathway to success. The allure of these scaling theories lies,...
-
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...
-
Effective learning is a key driver of market systems change, with the potential to enhance system competitiveness, resilience, and inclusiveness. Shifting the Locus of Learning: Catalyzing Private Sector Learning to Drive Systemic Change recently outlined a rationale for enhancing the scale and quality of learning in a system and identifying 10 strategies programs can contextualize to catalyze learning. These strategies are also backed with robust examples from 13 programs doing this work...
-
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.
Explore
Theme
-
Sectors [+]
- Advocacy and Activism (1)
- Agriculture (1)
- Alternative Development (7)
- Cash Trasfers (1)
- Children (2)
- Economic development (5)
- Employment (1)
- Fragile and Conflict Aflicted Settings (2)
- Governance and Accountability (7)
- Humanitarian Aid (2)
- Innovation (in Development) (10)
- Institutional Reform (1)
- Knowledge to Practice (2)
- Locally driven development (1)
- Locally led development (2)
- Organizational Change (2)
- Research for Development (R4D) (6)
- Scaling up / Propagating (7)
- Social Accountability (1)
- Social Change (2)
- Social Protection (1)
- Technology (in Development) (3)
- Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) (1)
- Adaptive Approaches [+] (26)
- Cases (11)
-
Development Actors Perspectives
(12)
- AFD (Agence Française de Développement) (1)
- FCDO/DFID (UK) (1)
- GIZ (Germany) (1)
- KOICA (Korea's International Co-operation Agency) (1)
- NGO Perspectives (2)
- OECD/DAC - Results Based Management (1)
- Private Companies - Development Industry (1)
- Private Donors (OSF, Hewlett...) (2)
- UNDP, UN Global Pulse, UN... (1)
- USAID (6)
-
Geography
(8)
-
Africa
(3)
- Central Africa (1)
- Eastern Africa (1)
- Northern Africa (1)
- West Africa (2)
-
Americas
(1)
- Central America (1)
- South America (1)
-
Asia
(6)
-
South-eastern Asia
(3)
- Myanmar (2)
- Philippines (1)
- Thailand (1)
- Timor Leste (1)
-
Southern Asia
(4)
- Bangladesh (3)
- India (1)
- Nepal (1)
- Pakistan (1)
- Sri Lanka (1)
- Western Asia (1)
-
South-eastern Asia
(3)
-
Africa
(3)
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
(20)
- Case Study (1)
- Cost-Benefit Analysis (1)
- Ex-post Evaluation (1)
- Feedback Systems (1)
- Impact evaluation (1)
- Innovation System Analysis (1)
- MEL in International Development (3)
- Network Analysis (1)
- Outcome Harvesting (1)
- Participatory Action Research (1)
- Power Analysis (1)
- Process Tracing (1)
- Randomized Controlled Trials (1)
- Realist Evaluation (1)
- Rubrics (1)
- Scenario Planning (1)
- Systemic Change (6)
- Systems Mapping (3)
- Theory-based evaluations (1)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (2)
- Value for Money (1)
- Networks and Communities of Practice (1)
-
Practical
(10)
- Tools (1)
Resource type
- Blog Post (4)
- Book (5)
- Journal Article (12)
- Magazine Article (1)
- Report (19)
- Video Recording (1)