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PRA (participatory rural appraisal) and the more inclusive PLA (participatory learning and action) are families of participatory methodologies which have evolved as behaviours and attitudes, methods, and practices of sharing. During the 1990s and 2000s PRA/PLA has spread and been applied in most countries in the world. Among the multifarious domains of application, some of the more common have been natural resource management and agriculture, programmes for equity, empowerment, rights and...
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In fields like climate and development, where the challenges being addressed can be described as “wicked”, learning is key to successful programming. Useful practical and theoretical work is being undertaken to better understand the role of reflexive learning in bringing together different knowledge to address complex problems like climate change. Through a review of practical cases and learning theories commonly used in the areas of resilience, climate change adaptation and environmental...
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Summary There is growing recognition within the international development sector that there is a need for a new, more effective approach to engaging in public sector reform. This article builds on an emerging body of work that advocates more entrepreneurial and adaptive public sector reform programming. Drawing on knowledge and theory from public sector management, psychology and entrepreneurialism, this article aims to understand what motivates public sector workers to work...
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This article provides an overview of the use of foresight-type approaches and techniques in policy-related work in international development. It draws primarily on published and grey literatures, as well as select interviews with foresight practitioners. It begins with a brief introduction to the approaches and tools used in the field of strategic foresight, and then a broad mapping of the foresight landscape as relevant to international development. It provides reflections on the evidence...
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This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often...
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While evaluation is seen as a mechanism for both accountability and learning, it is not self-evident that the evaluation of niche experiments focuses on both accountability and learning at the same time. Tensions exist between the accountability-oriented needs of funders and the learning needs of managers of niche experiments. This article explores the differences in needs and expectations of funders and managers in terms of upwards, downwards and internal accountability. The article shows...
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Healthcare systems are increasingly recognised as complex, in which a range of non-linear and emergent behaviours occur. China’s healthcare system is no exception. The hugeness of China, and the variation in conditions in different jurisdictions present very substantial challenges to reformers, and militate against adopting one-size-fits-all policy solutions. As a consequence, approaches to change management in China have frequently emphasised the importance of sub-national experimentation,...
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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...
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Issues of power are not new to program evaluation. What is new is a consideration of how programming uses insights into incentives that shape and adapt implementation. How should one evaluate in a way that explicitly assesses the ways in which a program considers power? One of the innovative topics deriving from the democracy and governance space is the approach of thinking and working politically (TWP) which is seeing increased use in development programming. TWP suggests different mental...
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Evaluation literature has paid relatively little attention to the specific needs of evaluating large, complex industrial and infrastructure projects, often called ‘megaprojects’. The abundant megaproject governance literature, in turn, has largely focused on the so-called ‘megaproject pathologies’, i.e. the chronic budget overruns, and failure of such projects to keep to timetables and deliver the expected social and economic benefits. This article draws on these two strands of literature,...
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There is a growing recognition that programs that seek to change people’s lives are intervening in complex systems, which puts a particular set of requirements on program monitoring and evaluation. Developing complexity-aware program monitoring and evaluation systems within existing organizations is difficult because they challenge traditional orthodoxy. Little has been written about the practical experience of doing so. This article describes the development of a complexity-aware evaluation...
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Knowledge management strategies are important for firms’ competitive positioning. This paper examines how knowledge management codification and personalisation strategies are developed in response to environmental and organisational dynamics in an international non-governmental organisation. A longitudinal case study of the organisation’s strategic reformulation of its KM strategy over a 2.5 period is drawn upon. The research examines how pressures in the firm’s operating environment led to...
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Developmental evaluation supports grant-funded initiatives seeking innovation and change. Programs born from aspirational grant language and plans often need guidance as they work toward creating workable models for social innovation. This article describes the challenge of designing and implementing complex programs and presents a case that illustrates how a program moves from proposal to practice. The Massachusetts Charter Public School Association Capacity Building Network is a complex...
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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...
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This chapter focuses on facilitation given by the Innovation Caucus to provide expert academic critique to inform Innovate UK's strategy for UK business innovation. As Innovate UK's strategy developed, it became evident that several policy domains needed critical insights and evidence. An academic critical friend provided the latest academic insights, evidence and wider perspective of the actors in the UK Innovation system, insights of which policy makers often lack. The chapter gave case...
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Research for development (R4D) funding is increasingly expected to demonstrate value for money (VfM). However, the dominance of positivist approaches to evaluating VfM, such as cost-benefit analysis, do not fully account for the complexity of R4D funds and risk undermining efforts to contribute to transformational development. This paper posits an alternative approach to evaluating VfM, using the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund and the Newton Fund as case studies. Based on a...
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Background: Addressing today’s sustainability challenges requires adopting a systemic approach where social and ecological systems are treated as integrated social-ecological systems. Such systems are complex, and the international development sector increasingly recognises the need to account for the complexity of the systems that they seek to transform. Purpose: This paper sketches out the elements of a complexity-aware monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system for international...
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The U.K. Ministry of Defense (MoD) has mandated the development of a network enabled capability (NEC) across all of defense, aimed at producing agile military and nonmilitary effects via a network of networks. This paper provides an overview of NEC, representing it as a complex human activity system of systems (SoS), analysis of which cannot rely on purely traditional reductionist engineering approaches, requiring instead a soft-systems engineering approach. A literature review is then...
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Development actors facing pressure to provide more rigorous assessments of their impact on policy and practice need new methods to deliver them. There is now a broad consensus that the traditional counterfactual analysis leading to the assessment of the net effect of an intervention is incapable of capturing the complexity of factors at play in any particular policy change. We suggest that evaluations focus instead on establishing whether a clearly-defined process of change has taken place,...
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