Your search
Results 130 resources
-
Technical assistance is provided to country governments as part of international development programmes to support policymaking or strengthen state capability. This article presents the conceptual evolution of ‘technical assistance’ linked to capacity development, starting with programmes aiming exclusively to enhance individual capacity in the 1950s to 1970s and progressing to complex systems approaches in the past ten years. It also presents some of the frequent challenges in designing and...
-
This article examines the current field of social design: its claims, practices, and methodologies. Findings discovered through qualitative research illuminate the current application of social design practices and offer critique around their use in the social sphere. This article argues that designers must be sensitive to a variety of complex social and cultural cues and structures or they risk contributing to, or practicing, design neocolonialism. The article offers two key theoretical...
-
Cooperation management facilitates the recoupling of progress toward sustainable development
-
How have local governments in China been able to break through central policy restrictions in a unitary and authoritarian political system? Why is China's official discourse in the reform era often so conservative and unfavorable to reform? The author argues the two issues are components of a signaling game between China's central government and local officials, in which local officials know that the center may be reformist, but the reformist center imitates the rhetoric of a conservative...
-
For over 40years, scenarios have been promoted as a key technique for forming strategies in uncertain environments. However, many challenges remain. In this article, we discuss a novel approach designed to increase the applicability of scenario-based strategizing in top management teams. Drawing on behavioural strategy as a theoretical lens, we design a yardstick to study the impact of scenario-based strategizing. We then describe our approach, which includes developing scenarios and...
-
This rapid review summarises the evidence on how to scale up inclusive approaches to complex social change. It looks at how to design scalable inclusive change interventions, as well as how to plan and manage the scale-up process. Focusing on interventions with the aim of reaching the most marginalised and transform social norms, it covers programmes aiming to deliver inclusive outcomes for women and girls (with a particular focus on preventing violence against women and girls) and persons...
-
Amplifying the impact of sustainability initiatives to foster transformations in urban and rural contexts, has received increasing attention in resilience, social innovation, and sustainability transitions research. We review the literature on amplification frameworks and propose an integrative typology of eight processes, which aim to increase the impact of such initiatives. The eight amplification processes are: stabilizing, speeding up, growing, replicating, transferring, spreading,...
-
The Scale Up Sourcebook is informed and inspired by the September 2018 conference, Innovations in Agriculture: Scaling Up to Reach Millions, organized by Purdue University, in partnership with the African Development Bank. The Sourcebook consolidates, extends, and disseminates some of the scaling insights presented at the Purdue conference. It is intended as an easy-to-use guidebook targeted to a broad and diverse audience of stakeholders associated with scaling agricultural technologies and...
-
Abstract Motivation On December 15, 2012 Sombath Somphone was abducted at a police checkpoint in his home city of Vientiane, the capital of Laos; his whereabouts remain unknown. This article considers his work and disappearance through the lens of Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) approaches to development. The article is supportive of TWP, but emphasizes the significant risks of politicized programming in authoritarian contexts. Purpose By examining the case of Sombath Somphone, the...
-
A statement “Prevention is better than cure” for illnesses in medical sciences also applies to the software development life cycle in terms of software defects. A defect is a deviation from actual functionality of the application in terms of the correctness and completeness of the specification of the customer requirements. Defective software fails to meet its customer requirements leading to the development of applications with poor quality. Quality is a top priority in every enterprise...
-
The role of making in the design process has been growing, taking on new forms and involving new players over the past 10 years. Where we once primarily saw designers using making to give shape to the future, today we can see designers and non-designers working together, using making as a way to make sense of the future. In this paper, we describe the landscape of design research and practice at the end of 2013 with special attention to the role of making across these perspectives: approach...
-
While agile approaches can be extremely effective at a project level, they can impose significant complexity and a need for adaptiveness at the project portfolio level. While this has proven to be highly problematic, there is little research on how to manage a set of agile projects at the project portfolio level. What limited research that does exist often assumes that portfolio-level agility can be achieved by simply scaling project level agile approaches such as Scrum. This study uses a...
-
Polycentricity is a fundamental concept in commons scholarship that connotes a complex form of governance with multiple centers of semiautonomous decision making. If the decision-making centers take each other into account in competitive and cooperative relationships and have recourse to conflict resolution mechanisms, they may be regarded as a polycentric governance system. In the context of natural resource governance, commons scholars have ascribed a number of advantages to polycentric...
-
This paper presents a framework for better managing policy messes and draws implications for bad and good mess management in policy analysis and management. The framework has three foci: (1) the cognitive space in which policy messes develop, particularly in terms of gaps between macro-designers and micro-operators; (2) the unique domain of competence within that space where professionals manage the resulting messes by virtue of their skills in recognizing system-wide patterns, formulating...
-
There are increasing criticisms of dominant models for scaling up health systems in developing countries and a recognition that approaches are needed that better take into account the complexity of health interventions. Since Reform and Opening in the late 1970s, Chinese government has managed complex, rapid and intersecting reforms across many policy areas. As with reforms in other policy areas, reform of the health system has been through a process of trial and error. There is increasing...
-
Only for the recipients of foreign aid is something akin to central planning seen as a way to achieve prosperity. The end of poverty is achieved with free markets and democracy—where decentralized “searchers” look for ways to meet individual needs—not Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The PRSPs and MDGs create lots of bureaucracy but hold no one specific agency in foreign aid accountable for any one specific task. Planners in foreign...
-
Payment by Results (PbR), where aid is disbursed conditional upon progress against a pre-agreed measure, is becoming increasingly important for various donors. There are great hopes that this innovative instrument will focus attention on ultimate outcomes and lead to greater aid effectiveness by passing the delivery risk on to recipients. However, there is very little related empirical evidence, and previous attempts to place it on a sure conceptual footing are rare and incomplete. This...
Explore
Theme
-
Adaptive Approaches [+]
- Adaptive Learning (17)
- Adaptive Management (28)
- Adaptive Rigour (1)
- Agile & Lean approaches (15)
- Design Thinking / HCD (23)
- Doing Development Differently (1)
- MSD - Market Systems Development (1)
- Other Adaptive approaches (8)
-
Other sectors
(11)
- Activism and Social Movements (1)
- Environmental (6)
- Organizational Management (3)
- Sport (1)
- Participation (2)
- PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation) (4)
- PEA (Political Economy Analysis) (3)
- Positive Deviance & 2 loops model (3)
- Systems Thinking / Complexity (34)
- TWP (Thinking & Working Politically) (6)
- Cases (10)
-
Development Actors Perspectives
(6)
- Canada - GAC & IDRC (1)
- China (2)
- FCDO/DFID (UK) (1)
- GIZ (Germany) (1)
- USAID (1)
- World Bank (1)
-
Geography
(12)
-
Africa
(7)
- Central Africa (1)
- Eastern Africa (5)
-
Northern Africa
(1)
- Egypt (1)
-
Southern Africa
(1)
- South Africa (1)
- West Africa (2)
-
Americas
(1)
- Central America (1)
-
Asia
(9)
-
Eastern Asia
(3)
- China (3)
-
South-eastern Asia
(4)
- Cambodia (1)
- Indonesia (1)
- Lao People's Democratic Republic (1)
- Viet Nam (1)
-
Southern Asia
(2)
- Bangladesh (2)
-
Eastern Asia
(3)
-
Africa
(7)
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
(23)
- Evaluating Multi-project programmes (1)
- Impact evaluation (2)
- Knowledge Management (2)
- Logical Framework (2)
- Mapping Visualization Methods (1)
- MEL in International Development (6)
- Most Significant Change (1)
- Outcome Harvesting (1)
- Participatory Action Research (1)
- Portfolio Management (2)
- Power Analysis (1)
- Process Tracing (1)
- Qualitative Comparative Analysis (1)
- Realist Evaluation (2)
- Rubrics (1)
- Systems Mapping (1)
- Theory-based evaluations (2)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (2)
- Trans-disciplinary Research (1)
- Utilisation focused evaluation (1)
-
Practical
(2)
- Tools (1)
-
Sectors [+]
(39)
- Agriculture (1)
- Alternative Development (10)
- Citizen Engagement (1)
- Economic development (1)
- Employment (1)
- Environmental Management (4)
- Fragile and Conflict Aflicted Settings (1)
- Governance and Accountability (3)
- Health (4)
- Inclusion/Disability (1)
- Innovation (in Development) (3)
- Knowledge to Practice (2)
- Organizational Change (1)
- Research for Development (R4D) (1)
- Scaling up / Propagating (4)
- Social Accountability (1)
- Social Change (2)
-
Technology (in Development)
(8)
- Appropriate Tech (2)
- Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) (1)