Your search
Results 129 resources
-
This dissertation examines when initiatives by International Development Organizations (IDOs) are more, and less, successful. The core argument is that allowing field-level agents to drive initiatives – what I call organizational Navigation by Judgment – will often be the most effective way to deliver aid. This inverts what a classical application of the principal agent model – the workhorse of studies of public management and bureaucracy – would predict, with better performance resulting...
-
Foreign aid organizations collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with mixed results. Part of the problem in these endeavors lies in their execution. When should foreign aid organizations empower actors on the front lines of delivery to guide aid interventions, and when should distant headquarters lead? In Navigation by Judgment, Dan Honig argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in...
-
The experience accumulated in the wake of more than two decades of sustained effort to promote growth and change in the low-income countries presents a rich field for scholarly inquiry and new insights into the development process. The success and failures of such projects, the new skills and attitudes they impart, and the internal tensions they sometimes generate obviously have an important bearing on the next stages of a county's development effort. Yet little has become known about these...
-
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...
-
Motivation In the last decade, a movement formed around making aid delivery more adaptive, relying on principles such as context sensitivity, flexibility, and ownership. The approaches seem promising for civil society organizations (CSOs) to fulfil their mission of fostering social transformation. While several donor agencies have started engaging with such approaches, the authors hardly see their political implications in practice. Purpose The article aims to provide evidence on an adaptive...
-
Human society is full of would-be 'change agents', a restless mix of campaigners, lobbyists, and officials, both individuals and organizations, set on transforming the world. They want to improve public services, reform laws and regulations, guarantee human rights, get a fairer deal for those on the sharp end, achieve greater recognition for any number of issues, or simply be treated with respect. Striking then, that not many universities have a Department of Change Studies, to which...
-
What's wrong with foreign aid? Many policymakers, aid practitioners, and scholars have called into question its ability to increase economic growth, alleviate poverty, or promote social development. At the macro level, only tenuous links between development aid and improved living conditions have been found. At the micro level, only a few programs outlast donor support and even fewer appear to achieve lasting improvements. The authors of this book argue that much of aid's failure is related...
-
Contributing to debates about transitions and system changes, this article has two aims. First, it uses criticisms on the multi-level perspective as stepping stones for further conceptual refinements. Second, it develops a typology of four transition pathways: transformation, reconfiguration, technological substitution, and de-alignment and re-alignment. These pathways differ in combinations of timing and nature of multi-level interactions. They are illustrated with historical examples.
-
The logical framework approach has spread enormously, including increasingly to stages of review and evaluation. Yet it has had little systematic evaluation itself. Survey of available materials indicates several recurrent failings, some less easily countered than others. In particular: focus on achievement of intended effects by intended routes makes logframes a very limiting tool in evaluation; an assumption of consensual project objectives often becomes problematic in public and...
-
We identify and document a new principle of economic behavior: the principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand. In a famous discussion, Albert Hirschman celebrated the Hiding Hand, which he saw as a benevolent mechanism by which unrealistically optimistic planners embark on unexpectedly challenging plans, only to be rescued by human ingenuity, which they could not anticipate, but which ultimately led to success, principally in the form of unexpectedly high net benefits. Studying eleven projects,...
-
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....
-
Albert O. Hirschman's principle of the Hiding Hand stands stronger and more celebrated today than ever. The principle states that ignorance is good in planning,
-
Development, it is generally assumed, is good and necessary, and in its name the West has intervened, implementing all manner of projects in the impoverished regions of the world. When these projects fail, as they do with astonishing regularity, they nonetheless produce a host of regular and unacknowledged effects, including the expansion of bureaucratic state power and the translation of the political realities of poverty and powerlessness into "technical" problems awaiting solution by...
-
Development and radical uncertaintyFeinstein, O. - 2020 - Development in Practice, 30(8), 1105–1113
Development strategies, programmes and projects are designed making assumptions concerning several variables such as future prices of outputs and inputs, exchange rates and productivity growth. However, knowledge about the future is limited. Uncertainty prevails. The usual approach to deal with uncertainty is to reduce it to risk. Uncertainty is perceived as a negative factor that should and can be eliminated. This article presents an alternative approach which recognises that radical...
-
Understanding and demonstrating the effectiveness of efforts to improve the lives of those living in poverty is an essential part of international development practice. But who decides what counts as good or credible evidence? Can the drive to measure results do justice to and promote transformational change change that challenges the power relations that produce and reproduce inequality, injustice and the non-fulfillment of human rights? The Politics of Evidence in International Development...
Explore
Theme
-
Sectors [+]
- Alternative Development
- Citizen Engagement (7)
- Employment (1)
- Fragile and Conflict Aflicted Settings (1)
- Governance and Accountability (6)
- Health (1)
- Inclusion/Disability (1)
-
Innovation (in Development)
(22)
- Funding (1)
- Institutional Reform (1)
- Knowledge to Practice (5)
- Locally driven development (3)
- Organizational Change (3)
- Peace Building (1)
- Rural development (7)
- Social Accountability (1)
- Technology (in Development) (1)
-
Adaptive Approaches [+]
(57)
- Adaptive Learning (11)
- Adaptive Management (29)
- Agile & Lean approaches (1)
- Design Thinking / HCD (3)
- MSD - Market Systems Development (1)
- Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (1)
- Other Adaptive approaches (2)
- Other sectors (2)
- PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation) (1)
- PEA (Political Economy Analysis) (2)
- Systems Thinking / Complexity (10)
- TWP (Thinking & Working Politically) (7)
- Cases (2)
-
Development Actors Perspectives
(10)
- FCDO/DFID (UK) (3)
- NGO Perspectives (2)
- Private Donors (OSF, Hewlett...) (1)
- USAID (1)
- World Bank (4)
-
Geography
(7)
-
Africa
(3)
- Eastern Africa (2)
-
Southern Africa
(1)
- Lesotho (1)
-
West Africa
(1)
- Nigeria (1)
-
Asia
(5)
-
Eastern Asia
(1)
- China (1)
-
South-eastern Asia
(3)
- Myanmar (1)
- Philippines (1)
- Thailand (1)
- Timor Leste (1)
- Viet Nam (1)
-
Southern Asia
(2)
- Bangladesh (2)
- Nepal (1)
-
Eastern Asia
(1)
-
Africa
(3)
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
(15)
- Capacity Development (1)
- Ex-post Evaluation (1)
- Impact evaluation (1)
- Knowledge Management (1)
- Logical Framework (1)
- MEL in International Development (2)
- Participatory Action Research (1)
- Participatory Rural Appraisal - PRA, RRA (2)
- Scenario Planning (1)
- Sustainability (1)
- Systemic Change (3)
- Theory-based evaluations (1)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (1)
- Value for Money (2)
- Practical (3)
Resource type
- Blog Post (15)
- Book (36)
- Book Section (4)
- Conference Paper (1)
- Journal Article (27)
- Magazine Article (2)
Publication year
- Between 1900 and 1999 (18)
- Between 2000 and 2024 (111)