Your search
Results 90 resources
-
The Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) programme was a three-year initiative funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) that brought together 20 projects from across the global South to understand the socioeconomic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, improve existing responses, and generate better policy options for recovery. The research covered 42 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to understand the ways in which the pandemic...
-
Inclusive and rigorous peacebuilding evaluation is both vital and complex. In this blog we share examples of how we are innovating our methodologies to move towards participatory and adaptive practice.
-
Among the many principles that currently inform donor-funded development initiatives, three appear to stand out: they should be politically informed, locally led, and adaptive. There is as yet little practical guidance for aid implementers regarding how to operationalise these approaches. What will it take to shift practice away from linear and planned approaches, towards models which foster local leadership and which engage with emergent and complex systems? This paper suggests that the...
-
Our new guide provides practical advice to help any organisation working in public service apply the Human Learning Systems approach to their work. In doing so, they will be better equipped to explore, learn and respond to the unique strengths and needs of each person, family and community they serve.
-
The world changes too much for anyone who is invested in social change work to imagine that this work is linear and predictable. Opportunities come and go, whether caused by a pandemic or political shifts. This much most social movement leaders and activists intuitively understand. But what can be done with this realization? How might movement groups better prepare for moments of opportunity? We want to explore how we can create the changes we want to see by responding to the changes that are outside our control.
-
This paper synthesises the findings of a set of country studies commissioned by the RISE Programme to explore the influence of politics and power on education sector policymaking and implementation. The synthesis groups the countries into three political-institutional contexts: - Dominant contexts, where power is centred around a political leader and a hierarchical governance structure. As the Vietnam case details, top-down leadership potentially can provide a robust platform for improving...
-
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....
-
The complexity of issues addressed by research for development (R4D) requires collaborations between partners from a range of disciplines and cultural contexts. Power asymmetries within such partnerships may obstruct the fair distribution of resources, responsibilities and benefits across all partners. This paper presents a cross-case analysis of five R4D partnership evaluations, their methods and how they unearthed and addressed power asymmetries. It contributes to the field of R4D...
-
As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering,...
-
Responses to sustainability challenges are not delivering results at the scale and speed called for by science, international agreements, and concerned citizens. Yet there is a tendency to underestimate the large-scale impacts of small-scale, local, and contextualized actions, and particularly the role of individuals in scaling transformations. Here, we explore a fractal approach to scaling sustainability transformations based on “universal values.” Universal values are proposed as intrinsic...
-
Foreign aid and international development frequently bring with it a range of unintended consequences, both negative and positive. This book delves into these consequences, providing a fresh and comprehensive guide to understanding and addressing them. The book starts by laying out a theoretical framework based on complexity thinking, before going on to explore the ten most prevalent kinds of unintended effects of foreign aid: backlash effects, conflict effects, migration and resettlement...
-
For AC practitioners, systems mapping is essential but also difficult. To lessen obstacles, Peter Woodrow proposes a scaffolded approach. An Experiment in “Fast Forwarding” Drawing upon our near-decade work on corruption, we recently decided to try an experiment: we would present “common patterns” of corruption as tentative models to adapt and add to—rather than try to teach people to do systems mapping from scratch. In this teaching experiment, each common pattern would function as a kind...
-
This thesis applies ideational and institutional theories to analyse how two specific ideas, results and adaptation, have changed the theory and practice of development cooperation. The thesis addresses the question of why the results and adaptation ideas are often treated as binaries and how this debate has evolved historically. In a first theoretical paper, the evolution of results and adaptation is conceptualised as a combination of institutional layering and diffusion within development...
-
Calls for more ‘adaptive programming’ have been prominent in international development practice for over a decade. Learning-by-doing is a crucial element of this, but programmes have often found it challenging to become more learning oriented. Establishing some form of reflective practice, against countervailing incentives, is difficult. Incorporating data collection processes that generate useful, timely and practical information to inform these reflections is even more so.This paper...
-
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...
-
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.
-
In 2015, leaders from around the world agreed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. The seventh goal (SDG7) is: “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” In the same year, the world’s leaders concluded the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, which will require a global transition in the energy sector away from the use of fossil fuels. Yet, despite growing investments in clean energy in many developing countries, the...
-
If you just remember these... If you can avoid building it, don’t build it; if you have to build it, hire a CTO, ship early, and mature long; and no matter what, draw on a trusted crew, build lean and fast, and get close to and build with your users as soon as possible. --- This guide aims to help you avoid bad projects, structure the team right, ship and learn quicker, and mature longer. The guide starts with project selection, including why the best project to select is no project at...
-
There are many definitions of the term ‘transformation’ or ‘transformational change’. The first section of the report develops a basic understanding of transformations or transitions (used synonymously) viewed from various perspectives. In this, transformations are defined as processes that use disruptive innovations to change systems into fundamentally new systems that subsequently form the new mainstream. Section two describes existing approaches to environmental and climate finance in...
Explore
Theme
-
Adaptive Approaches [+]
- Adaptive Learning (12)
- Adaptive Management (37)
- Adaptive Rigour (1)
- Agile & Lean approaches (5)
- CLA (Collaborating Learning Adapting) (1)
- Design Thinking / HCD (3)
- Human Learning Systems (1)
- MSD - Market Systems Development (6)
- Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (2)
- Other Adaptive approaches (3)
- Other sectors (5)
- Participation (3)
- PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation) (3)
- PEA (Political Economy Analysis) (5)
- Results Based Management (1)
- Systemcraft (1)
- Systems Thinking / Complexity (26)
- TWP (Thinking & Working Politically) (6)
-
Sectors [+]
- Agriculture (3)
- Alternative Development (15)
- Cash Trasfers (1)
- Children (3)
- Citizen Engagement (1)
- Climate Change (3)
- Economic development (6)
- Education (4)
- Employment (1)
- Environmental Management (3)
- Fragile and Conflict Aflicted Settings (5)
- Gender (6)
- Governance and Accountability (12)
- Health (3)
- Humanitarian Aid (4)
- Inclusion/Disability (1)
-
Innovation (in Development)
(13)
- Funding (1)
- Institutional Capacity & Change (5)
- Institutional Reform (4)
- Knowledge to Practice (3)
- Land Reform (1)
- Locally driven development (4)
- NGOs (2)
- Organizational Change (9)
- Pastoralism (1)
- Peace Building (2)
- Research for Development (R4D) (1)
- Scaling up / Propagating (7)
- Social Accountability (4)
- Social Change (2)
-
Technology (in Development)
(4)
- Appropriate Tech (1)
- Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) (1)
- Cases (20)
- Courses (2)
-
Development Actors Perspectives
(31)
- AFD (Agence Française de Développement) (1)
- China (1)
- FCDO/DFID (UK) (3)
- GIZ (Germany) (4)
- IFAD (1)
- Irish Aid (1)
- KOICA (Korea's International Co-operation Agency) (1)
- NGO Perspectives (7)
- OECD/DAC - Results Based Management (1)
- Private Companies - Development Industry (3)
- Private Donors (OSF, Hewlett...) (2)
- UNDP, UN Global Pulse, UN... (2)
- USAID (10)
- WFP (1)
- World Bank (1)
-
Geography
(30)
-
Africa
(20)
- Central Africa (3)
-
Eastern Africa
(14)
- Kenya (2)
- Mozambique (3)
- Rwanda (2)
- Somalia (1)
- South Sudan (1)
- Tanzania (2)
- Uganda (4)
- Zimbabwe (3)
- Northern Africa (1)
-
Southern Africa
(1)
- South Africa (1)
-
West Africa
(8)
- Mali (1)
- Nigeria (4)
- Senegal (1)
- Sierra Leone (2)
-
Americas
(3)
-
Central America
(2)
- El Salvador (1)
- Guatemala (2)
- Mexico (1)
- South America (3)
-
Central America
(2)
-
Asia
(14)
-
South-eastern Asia
(6)
- Cambodia (2)
- Lao People's Democratic Republic (1)
- Myanmar (3)
- Philippines (1)
- Thailand (1)
- Timor Leste (1)
- Viet Nam (2)
-
Southern Asia
(6)
- Bangladesh (4)
- India (1)
- Nepal (3)
- Pakistan (2)
- Sri Lanka (1)
-
Western Asia
(3)
- Israel (1)
- Jordan (1)
- Lebanon (1)
- State of Palestine (1)
- Syrian Arab Republic (1)
-
South-eastern Asia
(6)
-
Europe
(1)
-
Northern Europe
(1)
- United Kingdom (1)
-
Northern Europe
(1)
- Many geographies (1)
-
Africa
(20)
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
(41)
- After Action Reviews (2)
- Capacity Development (1)
- Case Study (1)
- Context Monitoring (1)
- Contribution Analysis (1)
- Critical Friends (1)
- Desk based research/lit review (1)
- Ethnography / Rapid Ethnography (1)
- Ex-post Evaluation (1)
- Impact evaluation (2)
- Impact Oriented Monitoring and Evaluation System (1)
- Innovation System Analysis (1)
- Institutional Histories (1)
- Knowing Unknowns (1)
- Knowledge Management (1)
- MEL in International Development (5)
- Most Significant Change (1)
- Outcome Harvesting (1)
- Outcome Mapping (1)
- Participatory Action Research (2)
- Political Economy Analysis (3)
- Portfolio Management (3)
- Power Analysis (1)
- Process Tracing (2)
- Randomized Controlled Trials (1)
- Realist Evaluation (1)
- Scenario Planning (1)
- SenseMaker (1)
- Strategy testing (1)
- Surveys (1)
- Systemic Change (11)
- Systems Mapping (4)
- Theory-based evaluations (2)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (2)
- Value for Money (1)
- Networks and Communities of Practice (2)
-
Practical
(23)
- Tools (2)
Resource type
- Blog Post (9)
- Book (4)
- Conference Paper (1)
- Journal Article (12)
- Magazine Article (1)
- Report (60)
- Thesis (2)
- Video Recording (1)