Library – Adaptive Management in International Development - Custom feed
Library – Adaptive Management in International Development
https://docs.adaptdev.info/lib/
2024-03-29T04:30:41.890879+00:00
https://docs.adaptdev.info/lib/atom.xml?creator=%22Piron,+Laure-H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne%22
Kerko
Is DFID Getting Real About Politics?A stocktake of how DFID has adopted a politically-informed approach (2010-2015)
https://docs.adaptdev.info/lib/PHP2FPQ8
2024-02-13T18:26:56Z
2024-02-13T21:44:21Z
1. Background
This internal stocktake assesses whether DFID is “getting real about politics” - how it
is taking power and politics into account in all its operations. Country Poverty
Reduction Diagnostics undertaken by DFID teams identify politics as the most
frequent barrier to poverty reduction and growth. The UK 2015 Aid Strategy has
committed DFID to spending 50% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in
fragile states. This requires a “patient, long-term approach” to addressing barriers to
peace and stability which are fundamentally political, rather than purely financial or
technical.
The stocktake is based on three DFID offices case studies (Democratic Republic of
the Congo, Pakistan and Malawi) as well as extensive internal and external
consultations between June and December 2015. It provides illustrations of how
DFID is evolving but does not systematically offer evidence of development impacts
or non-country work, as this would have required a different methodology.
2. What does it mean to take politics into account?
Politically-informed approaches are based on a large body of evidence that
confirms the importance of institutions and politics for sustainable
development. External assistance needs to support locally-led change. Success
depends on timing, context, political processes and local actors. Desirable outcomes
are hard to achieve and difficult to predict.
Politically-informed approaches improve development effectiveness through:
The ‘what’: political goals, using development assistance to shift how
power is distributed in the economy and society. The two main elements are:
aiming for long term transformation of institutions; and supporting locally-led
change processes more likely to be sustainable and successful: locallyowned (i.e. with local salience) and locally-negotiated.
The ‘how’: politically-smart methods, with greater realism and
feasibility. The three main elements are: understanding power and politics
in a specific context in order to identify opportunities and barriers for change;
influencing and stakeholder management skills; and proactive risk
management.
To influence DFID operations, a politically-informed approach needs to be
iterative, not one-off. The explicit understanding of context, whether formal setpiece studies or more routine analysis, should inform policy and programme
decisions, from high level strategic choices, to day-to-day implementation, for both
international policy and country support. This is a dynamic process: as the context
evolves and lessons are learned about what works, analyses and decisions are
updated. These are the principles behind the ‘flexible and adaptive’ agenda.
Piron, Laure-Hélène
Baker, Aislin
Savage, Laura
Wiseman, Katie
2016.03
en
Is DFID Getting Real About Politics?A stocktake of how DFID has adopted a politically-informed approach (2010-2015)
Understanding Political Economy Analysis and Thinking and Working Politically
https://docs.adaptdev.info/lib/AM9ZZ9HG
2023-02-27T13:34:35Z
2023-10-04T12:06:21Z
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 counterparts’ political incentives and preferences.
The guide summarises different types of tools – from very light-touch to more in-depth approaches – and provides advice on how development professionals can decide what is most appropriate in a given context, with illustrations based on the experiences of teams working on these issues.
This guide will help development professionals and others to make use of PEA and to apply it to their own specific needs. The first part of the guide offers a general picture of the approach. The second part provides more specific guidance for those who are tasked with
deploying a PEA.
Contents --> Main audience
What is PEA, its role and purpose (Section 2) --> General information for all readers
The main elements of PEA (Section 3)
Thinking and Working Politically (Section 4) --> Core information for teams planning and using PEA
How to ensure quality (Section 5) --> Essential reading for those directly responsible for a PEA
Important concepts and terminology (Annex) --> General information for all readers
Whaites, Alan
Piron, Laure-Hélène
Menocal, Alina Rocha
Teskey, Graham
2023.02
en
Understanding Political Economy Analysis and Thinking and Working Politically
Twenty years of UK governance programmes in Nigeria
https://docs.adaptdev.info/lib/TIF6T4KL
2022-07-01T11:03:20Z
2022-07-01T11:08:01Z
This Flagship report analyses 20 years of governance programmes in Nigeria funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in the North-western states of Jigawa (since 2001), Kano (since 2005) and Kaduna (since 2006), as well as the North-eastern state of Yobe (since 2011).
The report’s main research question is whether, how, under what conditions and for whom UK-funded state-level governance programmes in Nigeria have contributed to sustained changes in governance, and related changes in health and education.
...
The report concludes with the following recommendations:
To international development partners:
1. Invest for the long term – 10 to 20 years – combining support for both state and nonstate actors.
2. Ensure programmes have the strategic-level mandate, managerial capacity and frontline staff skills to pursue politically savvy opportunities.
3. Take PEA to the next level by unpacking causal mechanisms, understanding incentives and designing interventions to make change happen.
4. Give governance programmes the ability to flex between core governance and service delivery issues.
5. Incentivise greater collaboration between governance and sector programmes.
6. Incentivise greater attention to gender, and to social inclusion beyond disability issues, in governance programming.
To FCDO:
7. Empower and resource FCDO teams to enable TWP programmes, ensuring decision-making by country teams to respond to local priorities.
8. Re-imagine TWP for FCDO Nigeria, giving implementers the space to operate in TWP ways.
9. Incentivise stronger collaboration between PERL, Lafiya (health programme) and the Partnership for Learning for All in Nigerian Education.
10. Invest in impact data analysis.
To partner governments in Nigeria and beyond:
11. Explicitly set out the objectives for which you would like to receive assistance.
12. Use TWP principles to decide how development partners can support your political objectives and the scope for politically-feasible and mutually-beneficial collaboration.
13. Invest in the coordination of development partners.
To non-state partners in Nigeria and beyond:
14. Join coalitions to achieve your priorities.
15. Select development partners which can strengthen your skills, not just fund your activities.
Piron, Laure-Hélène
Cummings, Clare
Williams, Gareth
Derbyshire, Helen
Hadley, Sierd
2021/10
en
Twenty years of UK governance programmes in Nigeria
Thinking and Working Politically: Learning from practice. Overview to Special Issue
https://docs.adaptdev.info/lib/FKRTRFXG
2020-08-13T10:51:06Z
2020-08-13T10:51:06Z
Over the last 15 years, a set of ideas now referred to as “thinking and working politically” (TWP) has coalesced into a “second orthodoxy” about how to take context into account when implementing development interventions. This approach stresses the importance of obtaining a better understanding of the local context (“thinking politically”) in order to support local actors to bring about sustainable developmental change (“working politically”). However, the evidence base to justify this new approach remains thin, despite a growing number of programmes which purport to be implementing it. Officials in development agencies struggle with putting it into practice and it is unclear how TWP differs—or not—from similar approaches, such as Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) and Doing Development Differently (DDD). This Special Issue sheds light on what TWP means in practice by examining a set of initiatives undertaken by both development partners and government departments in Nigeria, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, China and India. This overview article outlines, in brief, each of the Special Issue's four papers and then draws out five lessons—for funders and for practitioners—from across all the papers. Our five lessons are: (1) the fundamental importance of undertaking political economy analysis (PEA) to adapt programmes to their contexts; (2) the importance of having a realistic level of ambition for interventions; (3) the need to support local ownership—not just “agreement ownership” (between a donor agency and government) or local “management ownership” of the programme, but critically “driver ownership” by generating trust with the key local actors driving change; (4) the need for a more effective set of tools for measuring results in complex programmes that attempt to achieve improvements in long-run governance; and, (5) that although the political economy of donors is often seen as a barrier to applying TWP, the articles show how much can be done with a TWP approach if the analysis takes into account the political economy of donors as well as that of the local context. We conclude with a set of operational recommendations for donors and implementors, as well as suggestions of avenues for further research.
McCulloch, Neil
Piron, Laure-Hélène
2019
https://doi.org/10.1111/dpr.12439
1467-7679
en
© 2019 The Authors. Development Policy Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Overseas Development Institute
Thinking and Working Politically: Learning from practice. Overview to Special Issue