Your search
Results 38 resources
-
This free guide aims to build the skills and confidence of people designing and facilitating participatory, productive, and engaging workshop sessions for work teams and communities of practice by providing them with a series of creative activities that can be run in-person or virtually. By the time they have gone through this guide, session leads will be able to: Describe ways in which creative activities can be of value to teams and communities of practice, Design both in-person and...
-
This free guide aims to build the skills and confidence of people designing and facilitating virtual meetings, including online community of practice sessions. By the time they have gone through this guide, community of practice facilitators will be able to: Design an engaging and participatory virtual session, Develop an effective, varied and realistic agenda for a virtual session, Apply a wide range of virtual facilitation techniques, and Using technology to facilitate virtual...
-
So you have just hear about systems thinking and systems innovation and are keen to know more, Ok sparky let's get started.We have structured all the content into four main areas that we think you ...
-
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...
-
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,...
-
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...
-
This document offers practical guidance for assessing the Value for Money (VfM) of government- and donor-financed programmes and policy interventions. In line with OPM’s focus and mission, it has been predominantly applied in the international development sector, but the approach upon which it is based is also used in the context of domestic public policy and programmes.1 There is increasing scrutiny on VfM in international development, but a lack of appropriate methods to support its...
-
How can we measure and learn when promoting systems change? It’s a challenge that has inspired Laudes Foundation to develop a rubrics-based methodology to help us, our partners and the wider field of philanthropy, understand our contribution to change, while learning and adapting to new and unforeseen circumstances. Change cannot be captured by numbers alone because metrics put the focus on what can be counted, not always what’s most important. Rubrics are a framework that set a standard...
-
Coalitions—groups of organizations and individuals that work together to pursue a common policy goal or reform—are crucial to development. Some of The Asia Foundation’s longest-standing and most successful development programs and portfolios have used coalition-building as an implementation modality. This paper examines successful initiatives in Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Timor-Leste. By delving into each of these, we shed light on this coalition-building...
-
Systems thinking approaches are gaining traction as an effective way of understanding and working with increasing complexity. They are being put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as well as the World Health Organisation as a way to tackle the complex and unpredictable environments we now operate in. As the world has become increasingly interconnected, national or local boundaries cannot isolate and control social problems. The climate emergency, war and...
-
The Two Loop model is a nonlinear theory of change based upon the ideas of living systems created by Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze. It provides us with insight into the simultaneous growth and decline process that are underway within a system during a transition period. In this way, it provides a heuristic for us to better try and recognize and connect the past to the future during a change process. It likewise gives us the possibility to try and come to some consensus about where we...
-
This guide is adapted from work by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) with inputs from members of the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice (TWP CoP). It outlines how to understand and use a set of analytical tools that are collectively known as Political Economy Analysis (PEA). The guide aims to equip practitioners to act in an informed manner, given that development objectives are invariably politically complex, and entail engaging with...
-
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...
-
The global Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) Community of Practice (CoP), the Washington DC TWP CoP, and USAID organised a webinar on 5 December 2022 to take stock of how USAID and its partners have used PEA to inform programme strategy, design and implementation, and support TWP. This paper synthesises the key points arising from the webinar, including observations on the impacts, opportunities, challenges, and prospects for PEA/TWP to become more deeply adopted and sustained as a...
-
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...
-
The past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in and concern over the global trend toward democratic regression. In South Asia, regulatory and institutional frameworks have become increasingly restrictive, curbing the ability of citizens and civil society organizations to occupy and use civic spaces to organize, express themselves, and participate in decisions that affect the lives of people whose interests they serve. Of course, this is only one half of the story. The other half is how...
-
Terms of reference (TORs) play an outsized role in driving scalable educational programming. These procurement documents shape, constrain, and signal programme priorities and possibilities. Successful funders and implementers across the globe hold rich processual knowledge about this documentation, which they use to draft and assess TORs. This project explores such best-practice knowledge around TOR review, seeking to support the design and implementation of educational programmes that can...
-
Evaluation practitioners in the international development sector have given considerable attention in recent years to process tracing as a method for evaluating impact, including discussion of how to assess the relative importance of causal factors. Despite the increasing interest, there is a relative dearth of examples of practical learning and evidence of applying process tracing in practice. This CDI Practice Paper draws on comparative learning from applying three different types of...
Explore
Theme
-
Adaptive Approaches [+]
(24)
- Adaptive Learning (2)
- Adaptive Management (10)
- CLA (Collaborating Learning Adapting) (1)
- Design Thinking / HCD (3)
- MSD - Market Systems Development (4)
- Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (2)
- Participation (2)
- PEA (Political Economy Analysis) (2)
- Positive Deviance & 2 loops model (1)
- Systems Thinking / Complexity (9)
- TWP (Thinking & Working Politically) (2)
- Cases (6)
- Courses (1)
-
Development Actors Perspectives
(16)
- AFD (Agence Française de Développement) (1)
- FCDO/DFID (UK) (2)
- GIZ (Germany) (1)
- KOICA (Korea's International Co-operation Agency) (1)
- NGO Perspectives (3)
- OECD/DAC - Results Based Management (1)
- Private Companies - Development Industry (2)
- Private Donors (OSF, Hewlett...) (3)
- UNDP, UN Global Pulse, UN... (1)
- USAID (6)
-
Geography
(6)
-
Africa
(2)
- Eastern Africa (1)
- Northern Africa (1)
- West Africa (2)
-
Americas
(1)
- Central America (1)
- South America (1)
-
Asia
(5)
-
South-eastern Asia
(3)
- Myanmar (2)
- Philippines (1)
- Thailand (1)
- Timor Leste (1)
-
Southern Asia
(3)
- Bangladesh (2)
- India (1)
- Nepal (1)
- Pakistan (1)
- Sri Lanka (1)
- Western Asia (1)
-
South-eastern Asia
(3)
-
Africa
(2)
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
(18)
- Action Inquiry/Collective Leadership (1)
- Case Study (1)
- Ex-post Evaluation (1)
- Impact evaluation (1)
- Innovation System Analysis (1)
- Knowledge Management (1)
- MEL in International Development (1)
- Outcome Harvesting (1)
- Participatory Action Research (2)
- Participatory Evaluation (1)
- Process Tracing (2)
- Randomized Controlled Trials (1)
- Realist Evaluation (1)
- Rubrics (2)
- Systemic Change (5)
- Systems Mapping (2)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (1)
- Value for Investment (1)
- Value for Money (1)
- Networks and Communities of Practice (2)
-
Practical
(16)
- Tools (3)
-
Sectors [+]
(19)
- Agriculture (1)
- Alternative Development (2)
- Children (2)
- Economic development (4)
- Employment (1)
- Fragile and Conflict Aflicted Settings (1)
- Governance and Accountability (3)
- Humanitarian Aid (2)
- Innovation (in Development) (6)
- Institutional Reform (1)
- Knowledge to Practice (1)
- Locally driven development (1)
- Locally led development (1)
- Organizational Change (1)
- Scaling up / Propagating (4)
- Social Accountability (1)
- Technology (in Development) (2)