Your search
Results 55 resources
-
Meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require adapting or redirecting a variety of very complex global and local human systems. It is essential that development scholars and practitioners have tools to understand the dynamics of these systems and the key drivers of their behavior, such as barriers to progress and leverage points for driving sustainable change. System dynamics tools are well suited to address this challenge, but they must first be adapted for...
-
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...
-
This document is a an Introductory Toolkit for for civil servants. It is one component of a suite of documents that aims to act as a springboard into systems thinking for civil servants unfamiliar with this approach. These documents introduce a small sample of systems thinking concepts and tools, chosen due to their accessibility and alignment to civil service policy development, but which is by no means comprehensive. They are intended to act as a first step towards using systems thinking...
-
Many education systems in low- and middle-income countries are experiencing a learning crisis. Many efforts to address this crisis do not account for the system features of education, meaning that they fail to consider the ways that interactions and feedback loops produce outcomes. Thinking through the feedback relationships that produce the education system can be challenging. The RISE Education Systems Framework, which is sufficiently structured to give boundaries to the analysis but...
-
Systems thinking is commonly accepted as the backbone of a successful systems engineering approach. As such, the Body of Knowledge and Curriculum to Advance Systems Engineering (BKCASE) team chose to leverage a systems thinking based tool, called Systemitool, to describe our project to the vast audience that would potentially become involved directly or indirectly in the success of the project. This paper describes the process and steps used by the authors and the BKCASE team to develop the...
-
This CDI Practice Paper is about the uses of Systemic Action Research (SAR) and Participatory Systemic Inquiry (PSI) for impact assessment (Burns 2006, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013; Wadsworth 2001, 2010).
-
This paper lays out a series of steps people can take to create the new systems we need to meet shared, public challenges. Systems are ubiquitous and powerful. We rely on them to support our daily lives: every time we turn on a tap, flick a switch for electricity, drop our child at school, jump on a bus or visit a doctor we rely on a wider system. There is a widespread sense, among decision makers and citizens that in the coming decades society will need not just new products, software and...
-
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...
-
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...
-
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...
-
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...
-
The Cynefin Centre’s Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme provides tools for collective sense-making in the areas of community development and youth work; civic engagement and democratic innovation; collaborative service/policy design and evaluation; housing/tenant engagement; futures and planning; shared learning and peer to peer knowledge exchange.
-
Tools for developing, exploring and evaluating predictive models of expected outcomes
-
9 propositions can help evaluators measure progress on complex social problems.
-
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,...
-
Drawing on action research, this paper recasts evaluation as ‘action inquiry’, an embedded evaluative learning practice that can help navigate complexity when enacting collective leadership. It is offered as an invitation to inquiry amongst a reasonably well-informed audience of policy makers and practitioners who work in and for public services. It will particularly interest those who provide research, evaluation and facilitation support, and those seeking to develop a more relational...
Explore
Theme
- Adaptive Approaches [+]
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
- Action Inquiry/Collective Leadership (2)
- Desk based research/lit review (1)
- Ethnography / Rapid Ethnography (1)
- Impact evaluation (1)
- Indicator-based approaches (1)
- Innovation System Analysis (2)
- Knowing Unknowns (1)
- Mapping Visualization Methods (4)
- MEL in International Development (4)
- Most Significant Change (1)
- Narrative Based Approaches (2)
- Network Analysis (1)
- Outcome Harvesting (1)
- Outcome Mapping (1)
- Participatory Action Research (2)
- Participatory Evaluation (1)
- Political Economy Analysis (1)
- Portfolio Management (2)
- Process Tracing (1)
- Qualitative Comparative Analysis (1)
- Randomized Controlled Trials (2)
- Realist Evaluation (2)
- Rubrics (2)
- Scenario Planning (1)
- SenseMaker (3)
- Stakeholder Feedback (1)
- Surveys (1)
- Systemic Change (27)
- Systems Mapping (6)
- Theory-based evaluations (2)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (8)
- Trans-disciplinary Research (1)
- Utilisation focused evaluation (1)
- Cases (5)
- Development Actors Perspectives (9)
-
Geography
(6)
-
Africa
(5)
-
Eastern Africa
(4)
- Mozambique (1)
- Rwanda (1)
- Uganda (2)
-
Southern Africa
(1)
- South Africa (1)
-
Eastern Africa
(4)
-
Asia
(1)
-
Eastern Asia
(1)
- China (1)
-
Eastern Asia
(1)
-
Africa
(5)
-
Practical
(13)
- Tools (1)
-
Sectors [+]
(16)
- Agriculture (1)
- Alternative Development (4)
- Citizen Engagement (1)
- Economic development (1)
- Education (2)
- Governance and Accountability (1)
- Health (1)
- Innovation (in Development) (4)
- Organizational Change (1)
- Scaling up / Propagating (3)
Resource type
- Blog Post (7)
- Book (4)
- Journal Article (8)
- Report (35)
- Software (1)
Publication year
-
Between 2000 and 2024
-
Between 2000 and 2009
(3)
- 2008 (3)
- Between 2010 and 2019 (21)
- Between 2020 and 2024 (31)
-
Between 2000 and 2009
(3)