Adaptive monitoring: a new paradigm for long-term research and monitoring - Lindenmayer, David B.; Likens, Gene E. (Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2009)
Long-term research and monitoring can provide important ecological insights and are crucial for the improved management of ecosystems and natural resources. However, many long-term research and monitoring programs are either ineffective or fail completely owing to poor planning and/or lack of focus. Here we propose the paradigm of adaptive monitoring, which aims to resolve many of the problems that have undermined previous attempts to establish long-term research and monitoring. This paradigm is driven by tractable questions, rigorous statistical design at the outset, a conceptual model of the ecosystem or other entity being examined and a human need to know about ecosystem change. An adaptive monitoring framework enables monitoring programs to evolve iteratively as new information emerges and research questions change.

You might not be as agile as you think you are - Lindpaintner, Julia; Rivera, Stephanie (18F, 2019)
The mandate to be agile is everywhere. But agile isn’t an on-off switch. It’s a skill and a mindset that is developed over time, through dedicated work, open teams, and lots (and lots) of practice

Livelihoods in the Za'atari Camp: Impact evaluation of Oxfam’s Cash for Work activities in the Za’atari camp (Jordan) - Lombardini, Simone; Mager, Franziska (http://hdl.handle.net/10546/620883, 2019)

Applying Adaptive Management in a Fragile Context – Case Study - Lonsdale, Jane; Green, Duncan; Robertson, Kelly (DT Global, 2023)
DT Global is proud to introduce our new Guidance Note: Practical Introduction to Adaptive Management There is a growing consensus around adaptive management as an effective (even necessary) approach when programs are tackling complex development problems. While there is no standard definition of adaptive management, there is general agreement that such programs need to routinely engage with and respond to program context; constantly test what works in that context; and adjust approaches, plans, and activities based on continuous learning. However, there remains a more limited body of evidence about what this looks like in practice—the enabling conditions, systems, resourcing, skills, and attitudes to effectively operationalise adaptive management. There is also limited guidance around when adaptive management is required, and to what extent—both critical and often overlooked considerations when planning for successful adaptive management. This Guidance Note draws together lessons and good practice in adaptive management from across DT Global’s diverse portfolio of donor-funded programs. It outlines our conceptual framework for adaptive management, with practical guidance on how it can be applied by our program teams. It is also designed to help our teams distinguish adaptive management from good (non adaptive) project management, consider when adaptive management is most useful on a program, and how adaptive a program (or part of a program) should be.

Thinking and Working Politically: Lessons from FOSTER in Nigeria - Lopez Lucia, Elisa; Buckley, Joanna; Marquette, Heather; McCulloch, Neil (DLP Program, 2017)
The Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform (FOSTER) was a £14 million programme that has helped Nigeria to transform its governance of the oil and gas industry. FOSTER ran from 2011 to mid-2016, and used an explicit ‘thinking and working politically’ (TWP) approach. It was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and managed by Oxford Policy Management (OPM). This paper seeks to identify the factors that drove – or constrained – FOSTER’s achievements, and asks what this can tell us about TWP, particularly in challenging political and sectoral contexts. FOSTER sought to help strengthen oversight and accountability in Nigeria’s oil sector. It aimed to support reformers within government institutions that ‘supply’ accountability (those governing how oil and gas revenues are collected and managed), and to support civil society organisations, parliament, the media and the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative to ‘demand’ reform. In addition, FOSTER commissioned a series of studies and provided media training to help broaden understanding of the sector and highlight the need for reform. This paper examines the outcomes from five ‘clusters’ of FOSTER interventions. The FOSTER team viewed the first three of these in the list below as successful, whereas the latter two did not deliver on expectations but offer important opportunities for learning: • Support to the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative • Support to demand-side actors to promote transparency and accountability in the oil sector • Support for the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill • An oil spill-mapping social media project • Support to the Department of Petroleum Resources The analysis drew on 44 semi-structured interviews conducted during a month of fieldwork in Abuja and Lagos; on reviews of the programme’s monitoring, evaluation and learning frameworks; and on newspaper articles and grey literature on Nigeria’s oil sector.2

Reciprocity in International Volunteer Cooperation - Lough, Benjamin J. (Fredskorpset Norway, 2016)

When Does the State Listen? - Loureiro, Miguel; Cassim, Aalia; Darko, Terence; Katera, Lucas; Salome, Nyambura (IDS Bulletin, 2016)

Governance Diaries: An Approach to Governance Research from the Ground Up - Loureiro, Miguel; Joshi, Anuradha; Barnes, Katrina; Chaimite, Egídio (IDS, 2020)
Research on empowerment and accountability tends to focus on collective action and its potential for empowering citizens undertaking the action and on achieving state accountability. In fragile, conflict and violence-affected settings (FCVAS) collective action is rare and risky. So how do citizens, particularly the chronically poor and most marginalised, interact and make claims on the different public authorities that exist in these settings, and how do these interactions contribute to citizens’ sense of empowerment and accountability? Given the current agenda of ‘leave no one behind’, an understanding of how such populations interact with public authorities to meet their governance needs can help identify the constraints to achieving development for all in these challenging settings. We developed ‘governance diaries,’ a cross between a panel survey and multi-sited ethnographies, as an iterative approach to capture their experiences around governance issues over time. We explain here how this approach works, and the challenges and opportunities it offers for research.

Adaptive Management for International Development Programs - Loveridge, Donna (2007)
Capacity development, that is “the process whereby people, organisations and society as a whole unleash, strengthen, create, adapt and maintain capacity over time” (OECD 2005) has been a key aim of international aid programs. However, capacity development efforts have not met with resounding success despite approximately 25%, or USD15 billion a year, being spent by donors in recent years on technical assistance1 which has predominantly been aimed at developing capacity. A 1998 review by the World Bank (World Bank 1998) found that the success rate for capacity development efforts was between 30 – 40%. The Commission for Africa (2005) noted in 2005 that achievements were below expectations. The OECD (2007) sees capacity development as being one of the areas which are least responsive to development assistance and therefore one of the greatest challenges. This paper proposes that development practitioners and donors could benefit from taking an evaluative inquiry-type of approach to the design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of capacity development programs. An alternative approach, “adaptive management”, is proposed. Adaptive management moves away from a rational linear A + B = C approach to capacity development towards constructing and testing theories of change2 for knowledge generation, adaptation and program improvement.

Market systems change rubric - Loveridge, Donna (Oxford Policy Management, 2022)
This systems change rubric describes different performance levels according to various systems elements, such as policy (formal rules), practices and relationships and connections. Programmes can use the rubric to assess the performance of systems to help decide where and how to intervene, or during and post-implementation to conduct progress assessments, and assess the effectiveness of interventions and type, breadth and depth of systems change. Each performance level description highlights the type of data and information that needs to be collected. One analysis is completed, users can compare this to the performance descriptions to see which level best matches the analysis. This helps programmes draw conclusions about systems changes. The rubric was developed in 2020 and tested in 2021 and builds on systems change thinking and frameworks from two previous FSG publications. It can be used as: pre-intervention to conduct an assessment during an intervention to conduct progress assessments and reflect on the effectiveness of interventions to change systems and inform decision making post intervention to make judgements about whether interventions were valuable given the resources, time and effort spent Useful for: Implementation managers to determine the effectiveness of interventions, as well as by Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) teams to track progress against expected outcomes.

Human Learning Systems: A practical guide for the curious - Lowe, Toby; Padmanabhan, Chandrima; McCart, Des; McNeill, Karen; Brogan, Andy; Smith, Mark (Centre for Public Impact, 2022)
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.

Exploring the new world: practical insights for funding, commissioning and managing in complexity - Lowe, Toby; Plimmer, Dawn (Collaborate & Newcastle University, 2019)
The world is complex. If we want to contribute to creating positive social outcomes, we must learn to embrace this complexity. This is the New World that funders and commissioners are discovering: • People are complex: everyone’s life is different, everyone’s strengths and needs are different. • The issues we care about are complex: issues – like homelessness – are tangled and interdependent. • The systems that respond to these issues are complex: the range of people and organisations involved in creating ‘outcomes’ in the world are beyond the management control of any person or organisation. Building on the findings from our previous report, A Whole New World, we have spent the last 12 months working with a growing movement of funders, public sector commissioners, and organisations working on the ground to begin to explore this New World: to find examples of practice that will help people to navigate it effectively. This report explores the key features of their response: working in a way that is human, prioritises learning and takes a systems approach.

Redefining rigour: using stories to evaluate systems change? - Lowther, Keira (Centre For Public Impact (CPI), 2022)
What might a different way of understanding rigour for work in complex adaptive systems look like?

Real Time Monitoring and the New Information Technologies - Lucas, Henry; Batchelor, Simon; Berdou, Evangelia (IDS Bulletin, 2013)
Debates as to the potential role of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in monitoring the wellbeing of vulnerable groups is often bedevilled by the failure of two principal actors – social researchers and technical experts – to address the other’s concerns or even to use language that is comprehensible to the other side. The aim here is to unpick some of the technical language relevant in this context and provide a brief introductory guide to some aspects of the current, rapidly changing and highly diverse ICT environment.

A Review and Critique of Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation Theory as it Applies to Organizations - Lundblad, Jennifer P. (Organization Development Journal, 2003)
Num Pages: 50-64 Place: Chesterland, United States Publisher: International Society for Organization Development, Inc.

Rethinking Rigor - Increasing Credibility and Use - Lynn, Jewlya; Preskill, Hallie (Spark Policy Institute & FSG, 2016)
Evaluations of complex systems change strategies or adaptive, innovative programs cannot use the traditional “rigor” yardstick to measure quality. This paper proposes a new definition of rigor, one that applies in any setting, but particularly in complex, adaptive ones. Top Takeaways: 4 criteria for the new definition of rigor: - Quality of thinking - Credible and legitimate claims - Cultural context and responsiveness - Quality and value of the learning process Regardless of its other positive attributes, an evaluation of a complex, adaptive program that fails to take into account systems thinking will not be responsive to the needs of that program.

How to do Process Tracing: A Method for Testing “How Change Happened” in Complex and Dynamic Settings - Lynn, Jewlya; Stachowiak, Sarah; Beyers, Jennifer (ORS Impact, 2022)
Process tracing is a causal methodology that can help people understand how a particular large-scale change actually happened within a complex dynamic environment. Much of the existing literature provides important information about the method; we wrote this brief to help more people operationalize the concepts and learn about practical steps for using this method more easily, with quality, and toward a more equitable world. This piece was written based on our experiences implementing process tracing when our experience showed that existing materials on the method had a lot more conceptual than practical information. We’ve approached this as people with some successful (and some unsuccessful) experience with the method itself, alongside deep experience in evaluating initiatives and strategies in complex and dynamic settings. We focus not on the Bayesian side of process tracing but rather on how this can be implemented in a way that’s more participatory and lifts up the experiences and wisdom of those closest to the work and the problems being tackled. We hope this contributes to and helps make more approachable the important work of political scientists and methodologists upon which this work sits.

Lost Causal: Debunking Myths About Causal Analysis in Philanthropy - Lynn, Jewlya; Stachowiak, Sarah; Coffman, Julia (The Foundation Review, 2021)

111 Evaluation Cartoons for Presentations and Blog Posts - Lysy, Chris (2020)

Towards transformative social learning on the path to 1.5 degrees - Macintyre, Thomas; Lotz-Sisitka, Heila; Wals, Arjen; Vogel, Coleen; Tassone, Valentina (Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2018)

What is a Theory of Change? Really. - Mack, Katelyn (FSG, 2015)
Recently thousands of evaluators came together in Chicago to celebrate the growing field, share exemplary practices, and to push our collective thinking on how evaluation responds to the complexity of social change efforts.

Impact evaluation for portfolio programmes on policy influence: Reflections on the Indonesian Poverty Reduction Support Facility - Mackenzie, Jessica; Hearn, Simon (Methods Lab, 2016)
• Donors are increasingly using portfolio-based programmes that embrace ‘good failure’ and adaptive, political programming. • However, measuring the impact of these programmes is challenging, especially for those working on policy influence and building country systems; not only do you need to measure the positive and negative impact of the overall portfolio, but also the different pathways tested. • Programmes, therefore, need a light-touch monitoring and evaluation system that allows it to remain flexible. • Good practice examples of portfolio-based programmes present six strategies to evaluate impact: 1. Develop appropriate logic models 2. Collect observational data throughout implementation 3. Develop stories of change or case studies 4. Understand causal relationships without a counterfactual 5. Purposefully select which activities to study 6. Be explicit about how impact will be valued across the portfolio. • These strategies are only useful if monitoring and evaluation is placed at the centre of programme decision-making.

Adaptive Management in Practice: a case study on the Prospects program - Maclay, Chris (Mercy Corps, 2016)
Recognising that aid and development programming takes place in complex contexts, Mercy Corps is increasingly seeking to understand how best to manage programs which iterate, adapt and respond to the consistently evolving settings in which we work. This brief Practice Paper provides some examples of what adaptive management looks like in practice on the Prospects youth employment program in Liberia. It does not seek to function as a manual or set of guidelines, but simply provides some practical examples and insights into how a youth employment program governed by principles of adaptive management operates.

Management not models: adaptability, responsiveness, and a few lessons from football - Maclay, Christopher (Development in Practice, 2015)
Despite a swathe of critiques of logframes and other blueprint approaches to development over the last 30 years, most aid infrastructure continues to concentrate on the design and subsequent implementation of closed models. This article does not propose an alternative to blueprints, but challenges the inflexibility of their implementation, which is inadequate given the complex nature of social change. It proposes a supplementary management and learning approach which enables implementers to be dynamic, adaptive, and responsive to problems and opportunities. Emphasising the role of donors, the paper presents a case study of one donor-led programme in Bangladesh doing just this.
Publisher: Routledge _eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2015.983460

The Appearance of Accountability: Communication Technologies and Power Asymmetries in Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Recovery - Madianou, Mirca; Ong, Jonathan Corpus; Longboan, Liezel; Cornelio, Jayeel S. (Journal of Communication, 2016)
New communication technologies are celebrated for their potential to improve the accountability of humanitarian agencies. The response to Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 represents the most systematic implementation of “accountability to affected people” initiatives. Drawing on a year-long ethnography of the Haiyan recovery and 139 interviews with humanitarian workers and affected people, the article reveals a narrow interpretation of accountability as feedback that is increasingly captured through mobile phones. We observe that the digitized collection of feedback is not fed back to disaster-affected communities, but is directed to donors as evidence of “impact.” Rather than improving accountability to affected people, digitized feedback mechanisms sustained humanitarianism's power asymmetries.
Keywords: Accountability; Audit; Communication for Development; Disasters; Ethnography; ICT4D; Mobile phones; Participatory Communication; SMS; Texting; humanitarianism

Implementation of the first adaptive management plan for a European migratory waterbird population: The case of the Svalbard pink-footed goose Anser brachyrhynchus - Madsen, Jesper; Williams, James Henty; Johnson, Fred A.; Tombre, Ingunn M.; Dereliev, Sergey; Kuijken, Eckhart (Ambio, 2017)
An International Species Management Plan for the Svalbard population of the pink-footed goose was adopted under the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds in 2012, the first case of adaptive management of a migratory waterbird population in Europe. An international working group (including statutory agencies, NGO representatives and experts) agreed on objectives and actions to maintain the population in favourable conservation status, while accounting for biodiversity, economic and recreational interests. Agreements include setting a population target to reduce agricultural conflicts and avoid tundra degradation, and using hunting in some range states to maintain stable population size. As part of the adaptive management procedures, adjustment to harvest is made annually subject to population status. This has required streamlining of monitoring and assessment activities. Three years after implementation, indicators suggest the attainment of management results. Dialogue, consensus-building and engagement among stakeholders represent the major process achievements.
Keywords: Adaptive harvest management; Human–wildlife conflict; Population target; Stakeholder involvement; Structured decision-making; Tundra degradation

The good and the ‘not so good’ of our experiences with SenseMaker - Mager, Franziska (Oxfam Views & Voices, 2019)
When we purchased a license for the SenseMaker research method in early 2017 (a proprietary data collection and analysis software), the excitement in our more “geeky” teams was palpable. SenseMaker ... Read More

How Decent is Decent Work? Using SenseMaker to understand workers’ experiences - Mager, Franziska; Smith, Becca; Gujit, Irene (Oxfam, 2018)

Wheeling in the Trojan Mice - Mahendra, Jackie (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2016)
One way to make risk-taking more palatable for social change organizations is to run small, light, nimble experiments––tests not built to win wars, but rather to quickly infiltrate new territory, attack new problems, and inform future tactics.

From Political Won't to Political Will: Building Support for Participatory Governance - Malena, Carmen (Kumarian Press, 2009)
* Geographically diverse examples of participatory governance in action* Practical case studies show how citizens can participate more fully in the political process Despite a recent wave of democratization around the world, traditional systems of representative democracy seem to be in crisis. Citizens in both the North and the South lack opportunities, rights and access to information and have expressed growing disillusionment with their governments. Ordinary citizens (especially women, poor people and other marginalized groups) are largely excluded from the political processes that directly affect their lives. There is now growing consensus that good governance is participatory governance (PG), but public officials are often reluctant to adopt such an approach. From Political Won’t to Political Will addresses the particular challenge of encouraging these officials to involve citizens in the political process. The book presents contributions by participants from CIVICUS’ 2008 conference on building political will for PG. Representing the perspectives of both civil society and government actors, they propose a number of strategies and lessons such as demonstrating the benefits of PG to governments, complementing formal democratic institutions, building trust, supporting PG champions and using strategic political timing. Their practical and highly original findings will interest anyone eager to see the empowerment of people around the world.
Google-Books-ID: xILlSXw3D5oC

Improving the Measurement of Civic Space - Malena, Carmen (Transparency & Accountability Initiative, 2015)
‘Civic space’ – i.e. the freedom and means to speak, access information, associate, organise, and participate in public decision-making – is essential to the healthy functioning and development of any society and a precondition for accountable governance and social justice. When civic space is restricted, human and civil rights are denied, government accountability is jeopardised, …

Getting intentional about M&E: choosing suitable approaches for adaptive programmes - Management, Global Learning for Adaptive (GLAM Blog, 2020)
Does the choice of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approaches and tools matter for adaptive programmes? In short, yes: monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) and adaptive management (AM) are intertwined. While programme monitoring data and evaluation results are not the only sources of evidence that programmes use for learning and iteration, they often are amongst most important ones — or at least they should be. Selecting what type of information to collect and analyse — and how — is critical for any type of programme. However, what AM especially focuses on is intentionally building in opportunities for structured and collective reflection, ongoing and real-time learning, course correction and decision-making in order to improve effectiveness.

Localizing Development : Does Participation Work? - Mansuri, Ghazala; Rao, Vijayendra (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013)
The Policy Research Report Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? brings analytical rigor to a field that has been the subject of intense debate and advocacy, and billions of dollars in development aid. It briefly reviews the history of participatory development and argues that its two modalities, community-based development and local decentralization, should be treated under the broader unifying umbrella of local development. It suggests that a distinction between organic participation (endogenous efforts by civic activists to bring about change) and induced participation (large-scale efforts to engineer participation at the local level via projects) is key, and focuses on the challenges of inducing participation. The report provides a conceptual framework for thinking about participatory development and then uses this framework to conduct a comprehensive review of the literature. The framework develops the concept of “civil society failure” and explains its interaction with government and market failures. It argues that participatory development, which is often viewed as a mechanism for bypassing market and government failures by ”harnessing” civic capacity, ought to be seen instead as a mechanism that, if done right, could help to repair important civil society failures. It distills literature from anthropology, economics, sociology, and political science to outline the challenges for effective policy in this area, looking at issues such as the uncertainty of trajectories of change, the importance of context, the role of elite capture and control, the challenge of collective action, and the role of the state. The review of the evidence looks at a variety of issues: the impact of participatory projects on inclusion, civic capacity, and social cohesion; on key development outcomes, such as income, poverty, and inequality; on public service delivery; and on the quality of local public goods. It draws on the evidence to suggest several recommendations for policy, emphasizing the key role of learning-by-doing. It then reviews participatory projects funded by the World Bank and finds the majority lacking in several arenas – particularly in paying attention to context and in creating effective monitoring and evaluation systems that allow for learning.

Case study: Embedding reform and exiting: LASER’s application of the hourglass approach to achieve sustainable results - Manuel, Clare (DFID-LASER Programme, 2016)
This case study describes how LASER has gone about enabling systemic change and sustainable uptake of reforms that address complex institutional problems in Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somaliland and Uganda. In each of these countries LASER has designed-in a sustainable approach from the start based on: (i) local ownership and leadership of reforms based on developing country (rather than donor) priorities; (ii) use of country (rather than donor programme) systems; and (iii) an understanding that the role of the donor / development practitioner is to support (rather than buy) reform. The case study uses LASER’s hour glass methodology, illustrated with examples from LASER interventions, to show how these principles guide LASER operations every step of the way.
Keywords: IMPORTANT; Practice

Delivering institutional reform at scale: Problem-driven approaches supported by adaptive programming - Manuel, Clare (DFID-LASER Programme, 2016)
LASER synthesis papers aim to help donors and other stakeholders better understand why and how to approach investment climate reform programming differently. The papers reflect emerging best practice and lessons learnt on what works and what does not work in doing development differently. The papers have been peer-reviewed by experts in the field including senior advisers at DFID, World Bank, IFC and the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (amongst others). Second synthesis paper - Delivering institutional reform at scale: problem-driven approaches supported by adaptive programming February 2016 Drawing on our experience on the ground, this peer-reviewed paper suggests how problem driven approaches, supported by adaptive programme management can be implemented at scale in relation to donor programming aimed at institutional reform and improving state capability.
Keywords: IMPORTANT

Forget the money: De-linking technical assistance - Manuel, Clare (DFID-LASER Programme, 2016)

Investment Climate Reform: Doing it Differently - Manuel, Clare (DFID-LASER Programme, 2015)
LASER synthesis papers aim to help donors and other stakeholders better understand why and how to approach investment climate reform programming differently. The papers reflect emerging best practice and lessons learnt on what works and what does not work in doing development differently. The papers have been peer-reviewed by experts in the field including senior advisers at DFID, World Bank, IFC and the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (amongst others). First synthesis paper - Investment climate reform: doing it differently June 2015 Drawing on our experience in taking a problem-focused approach to investment climate reform, we discuss in this peer-reviewed paper emerging lessons and reflections on what works, both in recent literature and in practical experience.

Analysis of the factors affecting the sustainability of ICT4D initiatives - Marais, Mario (IDIA2011 Conference Proceedings, 2011)

ICT4D and Sustainability - Marais, Mario (The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, 2015)

Who is ICT innovation for? Challenges to existing theories of innovation, a Kenyan Case Study - Marchant, Eleanor (University of Pennsylvania, 2015)
Keywords: IMPORTANT

What we’re missing by not getting our TWP alphabet straight - Marquette, Heather (From Poverty to Power, 2019)
Heather Marquette grapples with aid's alphabet soup, and explains why DDD, TWP, PDIA etc are different and why that matters

The power of positive deviance - Marsh, David R; Schroeder, Dirk G; Dearden, Kirk A; Sternin, Jerry; Sternin, Monique (BMJ : British Medical Journal, 2004)
Identifying individuals with better outcome than their peers (positive deviance) and enabling communities to adopt the behaviours that explain the improved outcome are powerful methods of producing change

Small-scale farmers in a 1.5°C future: The importance of local social dynamics as an enabling factor for implementation and scaling of climate-smart agriculture - Martinez-Baron, Deissy; Orjuela, Guillermo; Renzoni, Giampiero; Loboguerrero Rodríguez, Ana María; Prager, Steven D (Sustainability governance and transformation 2018, 2018)
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has the potential to help farmers implement both adaptation and mitigation practices. The mitigation aspect of CSA is often not considered by farmers due to a high discount rate and, as such, adaptation is usually the priority concern. This review article offers perspective on this issue and highlights two key gaps in the literature: (i) understanding of factors related to the uptake of adaptation practices with co-benefits for mitigation and, (ii) the role of social networks to better enable rapid, widespread implementation of CSA, the latter being critical to bringing CSA to scale. The systematic review treated literature on synergies between adaptation, mitigation and social networks in the rural sector, as well as case studies illustrating the importance of social networks in climate change interventions when addressing synergies in adaptation and mitigation. We find that additional research is required that explicitly focuses on how social networks and social capital may be harnessed to hasten the adoption and uptake of highly synergistic CSA practices. This will facilitate both adaptation in the near term and contribute to mitigation at scale, allowing small-scale farmers to both benefit from and contribute to a 1.5°C future.

Q&A: Complexity-Aware Planning for Stabilization Programming - Martins, Christy (DAI - Checkpoint, 2018)

The origins, development, and application of Qualitative Comparative Analysis: the first 25 years - Marx, Axel; Rihoux, Benoît; Ragin, Charles (European Political Science Review, 2014)
A quarter century ago, in 1987, Charles C. Ragin published The Comparative Method, introducing a new method to the social sciences called Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). QCA is a comparative case-oriented research approach and collection of techniques based on set theory and Boolean algebra, which aims to combine some of the strengths of qualitative and quantitative research methods. Since its launch in 1987, QCA has been applied extensively in the social sciences. This review essay first sketches the origins of the ideas behind QCA. Next, the main features of the method, as presented in The Comparative Method, are introduced. A third part focuses on the early applications. A fourth part presents early criticisms and subsequent innovations. A fifth part then focuses on an era of further expansion in political science and presents some of the main applications in the discipline. In doing so, this paper seeks to provide insights and references into the origin and development of QCA, a non-technical introduction to its main features, the path travelled so far, and the diversification of applications.

Innovating for pro-poor services: why politics matter - Mason, Nathaniel; Doczi, Julian; Cummings, Clare (2016)
This report addresses how politics matter for innovations. How politically smart approaches can help deliver access to services.

Farewell DFID … a personal obituary - Mason, Phil (LinkedIn - Phil Mason, 2020)
Reflection on how DFID was created.

Evaluating complex interventions in international development - Masset, Edoardo; Shrestha, S.; Juden, M. (CEDIL, 2021)
This paper reviews promising methods for the evaluation of complex interventions that are new or have been used in a limited way. It offers a taxonomy of complex interventions in international development and draws on literature to discuss several methods that can be used to evaluate these interventions. Complex interventions are those that are characterised by multiple components, multiple stakeholders, or multiple target populations. They may also be interventions that incorporate multiple processes of behavioural change. While such interventions are very common and receive a large proportion of development aid budgets, they are rarely subject to rigorous evaluations. The CEDIL Methods Working Paper, ‘Evaluating Complex Interventions in International Development’, reviews promising methods for the evaluation of complex interventions that are new or have been used in a limited way. It offers a taxonomy of complex interventions in international development and draws on literature to discuss several methods that can be used to evaluate these interventions. The paper focuses its attention on methods that address causality and allow us to state conclusively whether an intervention works or not. It shows that several rigorous methods developed in different disciplines can be adapted and used to evaluate complex interventions in international development.
Section: Publications

Evaluating complex interventions: What are appropriate methods? - Masset, Eduardo (CEDIL, 2022)
In the CEDIL Methods brief, ‘Evaluating complex interventions: What are appropriate methods?’ we identify four types of complex development interventions: long causal chain interventions, multicomponent interventions, portfolio interventions, and system-level interventions. These interventions are characterised by multiple activities, multiple outcomes, multiple components, a high level of interconnectedness, and non-linear outcomes.
Section: Publications

Local Empowerment Through Rapid Results - Matta, Nadim; Morgan, Peter (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2011)
Why local ownership and commitment are the exception in most development efforts—and what development professionals can do about this problem.

OutNav - Evaluate outcomes and impact - Matter of Focus (Matter of Focus, 2021)
Make better use of your data and information to learn, improve and tell an evidenced story of the difference your organisation is making.

Supporting users with the OutNav approash - Matter of Focus (2019)
This report has been generated in OutNav, using the theory-based approach to evaluation pioneered by Matter of Focus. Example of a report from the tool, explaining OutNav approach

Learning, Adaptation & Change: the future of Making All Voices Count - MAVC (Making All Voices Count, 2014)
Learning, Adaptation & Change: what Making All Voices Count has learned since September 2013 and how the programme will adapt and change in the future.

Contribution Analysis: An approach to exploring cause and effect - Mayne, J. (ILAC, 2008)
Questions of cause and effect are critical to assessing the performance of programmes and projects. When it is not practical to design an experiment to assess performance, contribution analysis can provide credible assessments of cause and effect. Verifying the theory of change that the programme is based on, and paying attention to other factors that may influence the outcomes, provides reasonable evidence about the contribution being made by the programme.

Addressing attribution through contribution analysis: Using performance measures sensibly - Mayne, John (The Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 2001)
The changing culture of public administration involves accountability for results and outcomes. This article suggests that performance measurement can address such attribution questions. Contribution analysis has a major role to play in helping managers, researchers, and policymakers to arrive at conclusions about the contribution their program has made to particular outcomes. The article describes the steps necessary to produce a credible contribution story. Contents Accountability for Outcomes The Problem of Attribution The Case of Performance Measurement Recognizing the Limits of Measurement Two Uses of Performance Measurement: Understanding and Reporting Approaches to Attribution: Contribution Analysis Techniques for Strengthening Your Performance Story

Developing and Using Useful ToCs - Mayne, John (2018)
Developing useful theories of change (ToCs) for anintervention, especially complex interventions, is not straightforward nor something done in a couple of hourswith limited effort. Agreement is needed on a number of basic concepts and terms, key challenges need to be addressed, and there are numerous issues that need to be considered.Butthe effort is worth the investment of resources and time.Theory-based evaluation approaches need good ToCs.Some of the ideas here are discussed in the context of agricultural research for nutrition and health interventions by Mayne and Johnson (2015) (10) Developing and Using Useful ToCs. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323868372_Developing_and_Using_Useful_ToCs [accessed Jun 13 2018].

Mayne18-Developing Useful ToCs REV3 - Mayne, John (2019)
An update on the previous September 2018 uploaded article

The COM-B Theory of Change Mode - v.5 - Mayne, John (Palladium, 2019)
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Theory of Change Analysis: Building Robust Theories of Change - Mayne, John (Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 2017)
Models for theories of change vary widely as do how they are used. What constitutes a good or robust theory of change has not been discussed much. This article sets out and discusses criteria for robust theories of change. As well, it discusses how these criteria can be used to undertake a vigorous assessment of a theory of change. A solid analysis of a theory of change can be extremely useful, both for designing or assessing the designs of an intervention as well as for the design of monitoring regimes and evaluations. The article concludes with a discussion about carrying out a theory of change analysis and an example.

Useful Theory of Change Models - Mayne, John (Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 2015)
Although theories of change are frequently discussed in the evaluation literature and there is general agreement on what a theory of change is conceptually, there is actually little agreement beyond the big picture of just what a theory of change comprises, what it shows, how it can be represented, and how it can be used. This article outlines models for theories of change and their development that have proven quite useful for both straightforward and more complex interventions. The models are intuitive, flexible, and well-defined in terms of their components, and they link directly to rigorous models of causality. The models provide a structured framework for developing useful theories of change and analyzing the intervention they represent.

Using evidence to influence policy: Oxfam’s experience - Mayne, Ruth; Green, Duncan; Guijt, Irene; Walsh, Martin; English, Richard; Cairney, Paul (Palgrave Communications, 2018)
Policymaking is rarely ‘evidence-based’. Rather, policy can only be strongly evidence-informed if its advocates act effectively. Policy theories suggest that they can do so by learning the rules of political systems, and by forming relationships and networks with key actors to build up enough knowledge of their environment and trust from their audience. This knowledge allows them to craft effective inﬂuencing strategies, such as to tell a persuasive and timely story about an urgent policy problem and its most feasible solution. Empirical case studies help explain when, how, and why such strategies work in context. If analysed carefully, they can provide transferable lessons for researchers and advocates that are seeking to inform or inﬂuence policymaking. Oxfam Great Britain has become an experienced and effective advocate of evidence-informed policy change, offering lessons for building effective action. In this article, we combine insights from policy studies with speciﬁc case studies of Oxfam campaigns to describe four ways to promote the uptake of research evidence in policy: (1) learn how policymaking works, (2) design evidence to maximise its inﬂuence on speciﬁc audiences, (3) design and use additional inﬂuencing strategies such as insider persuasion or outsider pressure, and adapt the presentation of evidence and inﬂuencing strategies to the changing context, and (4) embrace trial and error. The supply of evidence is one important but insufﬁcient part of this story.

The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies - Mazzucato, Mariana; Collington, Rosie (Allen Lane, 2023)
There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today which must change.Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies' reliance on companies such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown.The 'Big Con' describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by both the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks - as advisors, legitimators and outsourcers - and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. To make matters worse, our best and brightest graduates are often redirected away from public service into consulting. In all these ways, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies.Mazzucato and Collington expertly debunk the myth that consultancies always add value to the economy. With a wealth of original research, they argue brilliantly for investment and collective intelligence within all organizations and communities, and for a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good. We must recalibrate the role of consultants and rebuild economies and governments that are fit for purpose.

Collaborative geomatics and the Mushkegowuk Cree First Nations: Fostering adaptive capacity for community-based sub-arctic natural resource management - McCarthy, Daniel D. P.; Whitelaw, Graham S.; Anderson, Scott; Cowan, Donald; McGarry, Fred; Robins, Anthony; Gardner, Holly L.; Barbeau, Christine D.; Charania, Nadia A.; General, Zachariah; Liedtke, Jeff; Sutherland, Celine; et al. (Geoforum, 2012)
The remote First Nation (FN) communities of the Mushkegowuk Territory on the west coast of James Bay, Ontario, Canada are currently facing increased development pressures and the imposition of a government land use planning process. The land use planning process is mandated in the Far North Act (received Royal Assent on September 23, 2010). There is a need for capacity enhancement for community-based natural resource planning and management in the Territory. A number of frameworks are emerging for addressing change brought on by resource development and building resilience to such change at the community level. Among these include the concept of adaptive capacity. In collaboration with FN community leaders, we explored the use of “collaborative geomatics” tools to foster adaptive capacity. Our action research suggests that collaborative geomatics technologies should enhance the Mushkegowuk First Nations’ adaptive capacity to address environmental and policy change by allowing them to collect and manage data collaboratively (e.g., traditional environmental knowledge, western science) to create opportunities for innovative community development, including natural resource development and management.
Keywords: Adaptive capacity; Collaborative geomatics; Community development; Cree communities; Land use plans

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World - McChrystal, General Stanley; Silverman, David; Collins, Tantum; Fussell, Chris (Portfolio Penguin, 2015)
As commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), General Stanley McChrystal discarded a century of management wisdom and pivoted from a pursuit of mechanical efficiency to organic adaptability. In this book, he shows how any organization can make the same transition to act like a team of teams - where small groups combine the freedom to experiment with a relentless drive to share their experience.Drawing on a wealth of evidence from his military career and sources as diverse as hospital emergency rooms and NASA's space program, McChrystal frames the existential challenge facing today's organizations, and presents a compelling, effective solution.

How to Sharpen a Nonviolent Movement - McClennen, Sophia; Popovic, Srdja; Wright, Joseph (Journal of Democracy, 2023)
In the past three decades nonviolent social protest has become the most reliable path to democracy. However, not all nonviolent mobilization campaigns succeed. To examine why some nonviolent campaigns are more successful than others, we analyze the use of a particular type of activist campaign tactic, the "dilemma action." The dilemma action is a nonviolent civil-disobedience tactic that provokes a "response dilemma" for the target. Collecting original data on dilemma actions during nonviolent activist campaigns, we find that roughly one-third of mass nonviolent campaigns in the past century deploy this strategy. We theorize four mechanisms linking dilemma actions to nonviolent activist campaign success: facilitating group formation, delegitimizing opponents, reducing fear, and generating sympathetic media coverage. Finally, we assess whether dilemma actions increase campaign success rates, finding that dilemma actions are associated with an increase of 11–16 percent in activist-campaign success.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Why Lean Enterprise Transformation is Hard - McClure, Dan (ThoughtWorks, 2015)

Engineering Complex Scaled Up Innovations in the Humanitarian and Development Sector - McClure, Dan; Gray, Ian (ThoughtWorks, 2015)

Managing the Journey to Scale Up Innovation in the Humanitarian and Development Sector - McClure, Dan; Gray, Ian (ThoughtWorks, 2015)

Scaling Assessment Map: An Evolving Tool Supporting Innovation Scale Up - McClure, Dan; Gray, Ian (ThoughtWorks, 2016)
Nearly three years ago we wrote about the “Missing Middle” in the innovation lifecycle[i], a gap that kept successful pilot programs from reaching the goal of replication and optimization in multiple contexts. Since then, scaling humanitarian innovation has received a great deal of attention from the sector, with a number of new initiatives specifically focused on the scaling challenge.

Scaling: Innovations Missing Middle - McClure, Dan; Gray, Ian (ThoughtWorks, 2015)

Energy Governance in Developing Countries — A New Approach - Mcculloch, Neil (The Policy Practice & Chemonics, 2021)
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 transition is happening much more slowly than needed. The central reason for this is poor energy governance. This technical brief shows how poor energy governance damages energy access and efforts to improve the quality and reliability of power. It explains the political reasons why energy governance is so bad in many countries and contrasts this with the current system of procuring technical assistance, which largely ignores the energy governance challenge. It shows that a new approach to tackling energy governance is emerging that is better matched to the nature of the problems faced and provides recommendations on how to implement it.

Why Tackling Energy Governance in Developing Countries Needs a Different Approach - McCulloch, Neil (The Policy Practice & Chemonics, 2021)
Global efforts to improve energy access and quality and to tackle climate change need a different approach to addressing poor energy governance. In 2015, leaders from around the world agreed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030.1 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 of the energy sector away from the use of fossil fuels. Yet, in many developing countries, despite growing investments in clean energy, the transition is happening much more slowly than needed to achieve SDG7 and avert damaging climate change. The central reason for this is poor energy governance. This paper outlines the size and nature of the energy challenge, with a focus on electricity. It describes the investments that are currently being made to improve the quality of power and access to electricity — and the growing evidence that investments often fail due to poor energy governance. The paper then delves more deeply into how bad governance influences the quality of and access to electricity, with specific country examples. It shows the importance of understanding how electricity fits into the political settlement of a country and how this affects the incentives of key actors in the sector. Unfortunately, donor projects designed to widen electricity access or to support reform of the power sector in developing countries often pay too little attention to the problem’s political nature; the same is true of measures to improve energy efficiency or to promote renewables. The paper outlines a new way of thinking about energy governance and shows how interventions can be better matched to the different governance challenges that they face. It concludes with recommendations for donors on how energy programs can be better designed and procured — as well as recommendations for implementors on how to improve the chances of successful implementation by adapting to the political realities of the contexts in which they operate.

Thinking and Working Politically: Learning from practice. Overview to Special Issue - McCulloch, Neil; Piron, Laure-Hélène (Development Policy Review, 2019)
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.
Keywords: Adaptation; Development programmes; Political economy analysis; Reform space; thinking and working politically

COUNT - Understanding the challenge of government responsiveness - McGee, Rosemary (MAVC and IDS, 2014)

Power, Violence, Citizenship and Agency - McGee, Rosemary (IDS Bulletin, 2014)

Something’s Stopping All Voices From Counting… - McGee, Rosemary (Making All Voices Count, 2014)
An outline of Making All Voices Count's Research & Evidence component led by the Institute of Development Studies.

Learning study on 'the users' in Technology for Transparency and Accountability initiatives: Assumptions and realities - McGee, Rosemary; Carlitz, Ruth (IDS, 2013)

Appropriating technology for accountability: messages from Making All Voices Count - McGee, Rosemary; Edwards, Duncan; Hudson, Hannah; Anderson, Colin; Feruglio, Francesca (IDS, 2018)
Making All Voices Count was a programme designed to solve the ‘grand challenge’ of creating more effective democratic governance and accountability around the world. It used funding from four donors to support the development and spread of innovative ideas for solving governance problems – many of them involving tools and platforms based on mobile phone and web technologies. Between 2013 and 2017, the programme made grants for innovation and scaling projects that aimed to amplify the voices of citizens and enable governments to listen and respond. It also conducted research and issued research grants to explore the roles that technology can play in securing responsive, accountable government and building an evidence base. This synthesis report reviews the Making All Voices Count’s four-and-a-half years of operational experience and learning. It shares 14 key messages on the roles technologies can play in enabling citizen voice and accountable and responsive governance. These messages are presented in four sections: (1) Applying technologies as technical fixes to solve service delivery problems; (2) Applying technologies to broader, systemic governance challenges ; (3) Applying technologies to build the foundations of democratic and accountable governance systems; (4) Applying technologies for the public ‘bad’, when tech can be dangerous for democracy. The tech optimism of the era in which the programme was conceived can now be reappraised from the better-informed vantage point of hindsight. Making All Voices Count’s wealth of diverse and grounded experience and documentation provides an evidence base that should enable a more sober and mature position of tech realism as the field of tech for accountable governance continues to evolve.

Outcome Measurement in Local Governance Programmes: a Power Dimension - McGee, Rosemary; Pettit, Jethro (IDS, 2013)

Power, Empowerment and Social Change - McGee, Rosemary; Pettit, Jethro (2019)
This book uncovers how power operates around the world, and how it can be resisted or transformed through empowered collective action and social leadership. The stakes have never been higher. Recent years have seen a rapid escalation of inequalities, the rise of new global powers and corporate interests, increasing impunity of human rights violations, suppression of civil society, and a re-shaping of democratic processes by post-truth, populist and nationalist politics. Rather than looking at power through the lenses of agency or structure alone, this book views power and empowerment as complex and multidimensional societal processes, defined by pervasive social norms, conditions, constraints and opportunities. Bridging theory and practice, the book explores real-world applications using a selection of frameworks, tools, case studies, examples, resources and reflections from experience to support actors to analyse their positioning and align themselves with progressive social forces. Compiled with social change practitioners, students and scholars in mind, Power, Empowerment and Social Change is the perfect volume for anyone involved in politics, international development, sociology, human rights and environmental justice who is looking for fresh insights for transforming power in favour of relatively less powerful people.

From ‘Feedback Loops’ to ‘Responsive Governance’ - McGee, Rosie (Making All Voices Count, 2014)
Part of a sequenced learning process for MAVC's Research and Evidence Component, the summary of a thematic discussion led by researcher Rosemary McGee.

Introduction: Opening Governance – Change, Continuity and Conceptual Ambiguity - McGee, Rosie; Edwards, Duncan (IDS Bulletin, 2016)

Shifting Power? Assessing the Impact of Transparency and Accountability Initiatives - McGee, Rosie; Gaventa, John (IDS, 2011)
This paper arises from a review of the impact and effectiveness of transparency and accountability initiatives which gathered and analysed existing evidence, discussed how it could be improved, and ev...

Lessons from a trial of the Success Case Method - McGuinness, Liz (Better Evaluation, 2017)
The Success Case Method approach is useful for documenting stories of impact and for understanding the factors that help or hinder impact. It is particularly useful for uncovering the contextual forces that influence impact. Originally designed for evaluating corporate training programs, the Success Case Method is now being applied to other programs including international development interventions. Last year, I provided technical assistance to a pilot of the Success Case Method as part of the USAID-funded Complexity-Aware M&E Trials.

Evaluation Building Blocks: A Guide - McKegg, K.; Oakden, J.; Wehipeihana, N.; King, Julian (Kinnect Group, 2018)
This guide presents the Kinnect Group’s approach to evaluation. Developed through ten years of collaborative work, it has been well tested. While there are many other guides to evaluation and different ways to do it, our approach emphasises the place of evaluative reasoning in evaluation. The guide draws on the work of many evaluation theorists, as well as our practice-based body of knowledge. We hope that using the building blocks as explained in the guide will help you in your endeavour to do credible and useful evaluation. We find this approach works for us. Our clients tell us it gives them meaningful and insightful findings that they can use to take action. Our view to intellectual property is simple. What you read is yours to use. We just ask that you cite the guide when you draw from it. For those of you who engage with this guide and use it in your practice, we look forward to hearing from you. We are particularly interested in feedback where you find aspects of the guide work well for you. In that way we can all continue to build and evolve our practice.

Building a culture of learning at scale: learning networks for systems change. - McKenzie, Fiona (Orange Compass & Paul Ramsay Foundation, 2021)
This scoping paper explores the question ‘what would it take to build a culture of learning at scale?’. It focuses on systems-wide learning that can help to inform systems change efforts in complex contexts. To answer this question, literature was reviewed from across diverse disciplines and the realms of education, innovation systems, systems thinking and knowledge management. This inquiry was also supported by in-depth interviews with numerous specialists from the for-purpose sector and the examination of several case studies of learning across systems. The goal was to derive common patterns to inform a ‘learning for systems change’ framework. Learning for systems change is critical when working with complexity. The dynamic nature of complex adaptive systems requires an ability to continually sense and learn from the system and adapt accordingly. This is because the nature of the challenge and ‘what works’ to meet the challenge is continually shifting (Lowe and Plimmer, 2019). This requires an ongoing process of iterative inquiry that draws upon wisdom and insights from across the system. Such learning challenges traditional siloes of expertise and organisational boundaries (Clarke et al., 2019). Learning is not simply a nice to have. It is critical for greater impact and improved outcomes, particularly in mission-driven organisations and initiatives (Price et al., 2019). In this paper, a ‘learning networks’ approach is proposed, one that draws upon individual, group and systems-wide learning to build capacity and resilience for systems change in uncertain environments. This fills a gap in the literature where the focus is largely on learning within organisations. Instead, the focus here is on what is required to support learning to occur across scales and boundaries - from the individual to system-wide. A simple meta-framework for developing learning networks is proposed that includes high level guidance on the enabling conditions - the mindsets, relationships, processes and structures- that would enable learning networks to flourish.

Adaptability: the art of winning in an age of uncertainty - McKeown, Max (Kogan Page, 2012)
Keywords: Adaptability (Psychology); Success

Adaptive Management: Learning and Action Approaches to Implementing Norms-shifting Interventions - McLarnon, Courtney; Gayles, Jennifer; Deepan, Prabu (USAID / Passages, 2021)
What Passages has Learned about Adaptive Management: • Be reflective about information that is collected and create a culture of learning. • Be systematic about establishing monitoring and learning systems. • Be strategic about data sources and analysis, prioritizing areas for learning and addressing issues raised. • Be inclusive about information collection: who is collecting what, how, and how is it being used.

Scaling Impact: Innovation for the Public Good - McLean, Robert; Gargani, John (Routledge, 2019)
Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a synthesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predominant more-is-better paradigm of scaling. For organisations and individuals working to change the world for the better, scaling impact is a common goal and a well-founded aim. The world is changing rapidly, and seemingly intractable problems like environmental degradation or accelerating inequality press us to do better for each other and our environment as a global community. Challenges like these appear to demand a significant scale of action, and here the authors argue that a more creative and critical approach to scaling is both possible and essential. To encourage uptake and co-development, the authors present actionable principles that can help organisations and innovators design, manage, and evaluate scaling strategies. Scaling Impact is essential reading for development and innovation practitioners and professionals, but also for researchers, students, evaluators, and policymakers with a desire to spark meaningful change.
Google-Books-ID: 9X6YDwAAQBAJ
Keywords: Developing & Emerging Countries

Political economy analysis: Topic Guide - Mcloughlin, Claire (GSDRC, University of Birmingham, 2014)
Political economy analysis (PEA) aims to situate development interventions within an understanding of the prevailing political and economic processes in society – specifically, the incentives, relationships, and distribution and contestation of power between different groups and individuals. Such an analysis can support more politically feasible and therefore more effective development strategies by setting realistic expectations …

Complexity, Organizations and Change - McMillan, Elizabeth (Routledge, 2004)
Complexity science has seriously challenged long-held views in the scientific community about how the world works. These ideas, particularly about the living world, also have radical and profound implications for organizations and society as a whole. Available in paperback for the first time, this insightful book describes and considers ideas from complexity science and examines their use in organizations, especially in bringing about major organizational change. Author McMillan explores how organizations, their design, the way they operate and, importantly, the people who co-create them, are thought of.Explaining the history and development of complexity science in an accessible way for the non-scientific reader, this outstanding book describes key concepts and their use in theory and practice. Illustrated with real-life examples from organizations in the UK, Europe and the USA, the book includes an in-depth case study of an organization which used complexity principles as part of a strategic change intervention. From this, useful models for introducing a complexity-based change process are derived.Complexity, Organizations and Change will appeal to academics, researchers and advanced students who are interested in complexity science and what it means for strategy, organization and management theory and organizational change.

Demanding Good Governance: Lessons from Social Accountability Initiatives in Africa - McNeil, Mary; Malena, Carmen (World Bank Publications, 2010)
Accountability is the cornerstone of good governance. Unless public officials can be held to account, then critical benefits associated with good governance, such as social justice, poverty reduction and development remain elusive. The impacts of non-responsive and unaccountable governance are perhaps most harshly felt by the citizens of Africa, where corruption and governance failures are broadly acknowledged as a principal obstacle to the achievement Over the past decade, a range of social accountability practices―such as participatory budgeting, independent budget analysis, participatory monitoring of public expenditure and citizen evaluation of public services have been experimented with in many Africa countries. Their outcomes and lessons have, thus far, received little attend and documentation. This volume aims to make a contribution towards filling this gap by describing and analyzing a selection of social accountability initiatives from seven Sub-Saharan countries.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer - Meadows, Donella H. (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008)
In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001.Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

The effect of government responsiveness on future political participation - Mellon, Andrew Jonathan; Sjoberg, Fredrik Matias; Peixoto, Tiago Carneiro (The World Bank, 2015)
What effect does government responsiveness have on political participation? Since the 1940s political scientists have used attitudinal measures of perceived efficacy to explain participation. More recent work has focused on underlying genetic factors that condition citizen engagement. The authors develop a ‘calculus of participation’ that incorporates objective efficacy, the extent to which an individual’s participation actually has an impact, and test the model against behavioral data from FixMyStreet.com (n=399,364). The authors find that a successful first experience using FixMyStreet.com (e.g., reporting a pothole and having it fixed) is associated with a 54 percent increase in the probability of an individual submitting a second report. The authors also show that the experience of government responsiveness to the first report submitted has predictive power over all future report submissions. The findings highlight the importance of government responsiveness for fostering an active citizenry, while demonstrating the value of incidentally collected data to examine participatory behavior at the individual level.

The Haves and the Have Nots: Civic Technologies and the Pathways to Government Responsiveness - Mellon, Jonathan; Peixoto, Tiago C; Sjoberg, Fredrik M (World Bank, 2022)
“Civic tech” broadly refers to the use of digital technologies to support a range of citizen engagement processes. From allowing individuals to report problems to local government to enabling the crowdsourcing of national legislation, civic tech aims to promote better policies and services – while contributing to more inclusive democratic institutions. But could civic tech affect public issues in a way that benefits some and excludes others? Over the decades, the question of who participates in and who is excluded from participation mediated by technology has been the focus of both civic tech critics and proponents. The latter tend to argue that, by enabling citizens to participate without constraints of time and distance, civic tech facilitates the participation of those who usually abstain from engaging with public issues, leading to more inclusive processes. Critics argue that, given the existing digital divide, unequal access to technology will tend to empower the already empowered, further deepening societal differences. Yet both critics and proponents do tend to share an intuitive assumption: the socio-economic profile of who participates is the primary determinant of who benefits from digitally mediated civic participation. For instance, if more men participate, outcomes will favor male preferences, and if more young people participate, outcomes will be more aligned with the concerns of the youth. In a new paper, we show that the link between the demographics of those participating through digital channels, and the beneficiaries of the participation process, is not necessarily as straightforward as commonly assumed. We review four civic tech cases where data allow us to trace the full participatory chain through: the initial digital divide the participant’s demographics the demands made through the process the policy outcomes We examine online voting in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul’s participatory budgeting process, the local problem reporting platform Fix My Street (FMS) in the United Kingdom, Iceland’s online crowdsourced constitution process, and the global petitioning platform Change.org. Counterintuitive findings Change.org has been used by nearly half a billion people around the globe. Using a dataset of 3.9 million signers of online petitions in 132 countries, we examine the number of successful petitions and assess whether petitions created by women have more success than those submitted by men. Our analysis shows that, even if women create fewer online petitions than men, their petitions are more likely to be successful. All else equal, when online petitions have an impact on government policy, the agenda being implemented is much closer to the issues women choose to focus on. In Rio Grande do Sul’s digital participatory budgeting (PB), we show that despite important demographic differences between online and offline voters, these inequalities do not affect which types of projects are selected for funding – a consequence of PB’s unique institutional design, which favors redistributive effects. In fact, of all the cases analyzed, none reflect the standard assumption that inequalities in who participates translate directly into inequalities in who benefits from the policy outcomes. Our results suggest that the socio-economic profile of participants predicts only in part who benefits from civic tech. Just as important to policy outcomes is how the platform translates civic participation into policy demands, and how the government responds to those demands. While civic tech practitioners pay a lot of attention to design from a technological perspective, our findings highlight the importance of considering how civic tech platforms function as political institutions that encourage certain types of behavior while discouraging others. Civic tech, it seems, is not inherently good nor bad for democratic institutions. Instead, its effect is a combination of who participates on digital platforms and the choices of platform designers and governments.

Building effective research policy networks: linking function and form - Mendizabal, Enrique (ODI, 2006)
This paper looks at the factors that affect the key structural characteristics of research policy networks in an attempt to develop a methodology for studying and understanding what networks do and how. It builds on previous work on the roles and functions that networks carry out and focuses on their structural characteristics. The literature on networks is explored to identify the main and most common factors affecting their structure, and then the paper considers the possible effects of these structural factors on a network's ability to perform one or more of these functions based on some of the lessons learned from a study of seven research policy networks in Peru. The paper provides a menu of factors and characteristics worth considering when intending to build effective networks.
OCLC: 183914885

The Alignment, Interest and Influence Matrix (AIIM) guidance note - Mendizabal, Enrique (ODI/RAPID, 2010)
In 2007, on the eve of a workshop to introduce a new version of the RAPID approach to DFID policy teams, Enrique Mendizabal and Ben Ramalingam created the Alignment, Interest and Influence Matrix (AIIM), a stakeholder analysis tool that not only helps to identify key stakeholders, but also suggests a possible course of action towards them.

Understanding Networks: The functions of research policy networks - Mendizabal, Enrique (ODI, 2006)
We are constantly talking about networks. Banks use their networks to offer global services to customers; airlines fly passengers all over the world via their networks of partners; news agencies use media networks to keep us informed every minute of the day; and terrorist networks threaten citizens around the world. The importance of networks extends to the development sector: they organise civil society to advocate for and implement change; they link the local with the global, the private with the public; and they provide spaces for the creation, sharing and dissemination of knowledge. In a way, networks seem to make anything and everything happen. But we have yet to understand what they are and what they can and cannot do. In the development literature, a huge variety of policy and social network concepts and applications exists. This paper attempts to set out a framework to help clarify what research policy networks do.

Adaptive Management Self-assessment tool - mercy Corps (Mercy Corps, 2016)
The Adaptive Management self-assessment tool has been designed to help teams assess the extent to which they have a supportive environment for adaptive management within their country program. The self-assessment tool helps you think about five different areas that have been identified as important for supporting adaptive management: 1. Culture & leadership 2. Dynamic teams 3. Appropriate analysis 4. Responsive implementation & operations 5. Enabling environment (for example donor funding and relationships)

Adaptive Management Tools: Concept Notes System - Mercy Corps (Mercy Corps, 2015)
Mercy Corps finds adaptive management is supported by four different but interconnected elements: Culture, People & Skills, Tools & Systems, and Enabling Environment. These elements are discussed in the context of one of Mercy Corps’ complex programmes in pastoral Ethiopia.

AdaptScan - Improving your Team's Adaptive Management - Mercy Corps (Mercy Corps, 2020)

Agility and Evolution. How Mercy Corps Adapts at the Organizational Level - Mercy Corps (2017)
How Mercy Corps Adapts at the Organizational Level

How can we be more adaptive? AdaptScan identifies critical areas for improvement - Mercy Corps (Mercy Corps & IRC, 2017)
Keywords: IMPORTANT

Managing Complexity: Adaptive Management at Mercy Corps - Mercy Corps (2015)
Managing Complexity: Adaptive management at Mercy Corps

Webinar: Operationalizing Adaptive Management: What it takes. Why it matters. - Mercy Corps (Mercy Corps, 2015)
Development actors increasingly agree that managing programs adaptively – especially complex interventions – can improve their effectiveness. A growing body of evidence supports this claim. But what does adaptive management look like in practice? What does it require of managers and donors to make happen? How can we reconfigure incentives and success metrics to support adaptation, while remaining compliant?

Agile: A New Way of Governing - Mergel, Ines; Ganapati, Sukumar; Whitford, Andrew B. (Public Administration Review, 2021)
The evolving concept of “agile” has fundamentally changed core aspects of software design, project management, and business operations. The agile approach could also reshape government, public management, and governance in general. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors introduce the modern agile movement, reflect on how it can benefit public administrators, and describe several challenges that managers will face when they are expected to make their organizations more flexible and responsive.
_eprint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/puar.13202

Agile Software Development: Adaptive Systems Principles and Best Practices - Meso, Peter; Jain, Radhika (Information Systems Management, 2006)
Today's environments of increasing business change require software development methodologies that are more adaptable. This article examines how complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory can be used to increase our understanding of how agile software development practices can be used to develop this capability. A mapping of agile practices to CAS principles and three dimensions (product, process, and people) results in several recommendations for “best practices” in systems development.
Keywords: IMPORTANT

Guidance on tasks and deliverables for different evaluation phases - Methods Lab (2015)
This tool describes the five key phases of evaluation, from planning and design, to implementation and communication of results. It provides a list of the main tasks and deliverables for each phase, intended for use by anyone managing an impact evaluation. This tool was developed by Irene Guijt, Simon Hearn, Tiina Pasanen and Patricia Rogers for use in Methods Lab projects. It follows to some extent the BetterEvaluation Rainbow Framework.

Guiding questions to help narrow the scope of an evaluation - Methods Lab (2015)
Time and budget constraints can mean that programmes are not able to assess all possible evaluation questions; this is especially true for multi-component or multi-site programmes operating in challenging environments. This tool identifies areas of enquiry to help programmes prioritise the number of questions and measurement indicators used. This tool was developed by Anne Buffardi for use in in Methods Lab projects.

Report template on integrating impact into an existing monitoring and evaluation system - Methods Lab (2015)
Many development programme staff will commission an impact evaluation towards the end of a project or programme, only to find that the monitoring system did not provide adequate data about implementation, context, baselines or interim results. This tool provides a template outline for a report making recommendations on how to integrate a focus on impact into a programme’s existing monitoring and evaluation system, as the programme moves into a new phase. This template was developed by Anne Buffardi and Tiina Pasanen for use in Methods Lab projects.

Report templates for evaluability assessment - Methods Lab (2015)
An evaluability assessment aims to assess the extent to which, and how best, a project can be evaluated in a reliable and credible fashion. These templates are intended to help anyone conducting an evaluability assessment to structure the final report. This tool was developed by Anne Buffardi and Bronwen McDonald for use in Methods Lab projects. It accompanies The Methods Lab publication ‘Evaluability assessment for impact evaluation: guidance, checklists and decision support’.

Sample agendas for an evaluability assessment stakeholder workshop - Methods Lab (2015)
An evaluability assessment aims to assess the extent to which, and how best, an intervention can be evaluated in a reliable and credible fashion. These sample agendas are intended for people convening key stakeholders (such as project implementation staff and managers, donors and government officials) to discuss the purpose and scope of an impact evaluation and to identify key evaluation questions. This tool was developed by Bronwen McDonald, Anne Buffardi and Irene Guijt for use in Methods Lab projects. It accompanies the Methods Lab publication ‘Evaluability assessment for impact evaluation: guidance, checklists and decision support’.

Sample criteria to select case studies for evaluation - Methods Lab (2018)
Time and budget constraints often mean that organisations are unable to evaluate all of their programmes, and large programmes, operating in multiple locations, are unable to evaluate all project sites. This tool introduces two sets of criteria to support evaluators and programme managers to select case studies or programmes for evaluation: i) information about how relevant or feasible evaluation is for individual programmes, and ii) across the overall portfolio, strategic thinking around what types of cases are most important to understand. This tool was developed by Anne Buffardi, Irene Guijt, Simon Hearn and Tiina Pasanen for use in The Methods Lab projects.

Sample interview questions for evaluability assessment - Methods Lab (2015)

Template concept note for an impact evaluation - Methods Lab (2015)

Sustainability and Value through Improved Decision-making - Meyer, Isabel; Marais, Mario (Designing and implementing an Information and Communication Technology for Rural Education Development (ICT4RED) initiative in a resource-constrained environment: Nciba school district, Eastern Cape, South Africa, 2014)

Design for Sustainability: Countering the Drivers of Unsustainability in Development Projects - Meyer, Isabel; Marais, Mario Alphonso (The Journal of Community Informatics, 2015)
Development projects aim to make a difference in communities. Funders often require that the intervention needs to last, or that it needs to effect change that will last, over an extended period of time. In short, a sustainable difference needs to be made and this is an important measure of success. However, there are inherent drivers in the combined system of donors and beneficiaries that counter sustainability. This article explores these drivers, and identifies project design elements that need to be in place in order to promote sustainability by countering the drivers. This approach is applied to an education project, and implications for ICT4D projects are developed.
Keywords: Development; Project design; Systems Approaches; sustainability

The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions - Michie, Susan; van Stralen, Maartje M; West, Robert (Implementation Science : IS, 2011)
Background Improving the design and implementation of evidence-based practice depends on successful behaviour change interventions. This requires an appropriate method for characterising interventions and linking them to an analysis of the targeted behaviour. There exists a plethora of frameworks of behaviour change interventions, but it is not clear how well they serve this purpose. This paper evaluates these frameworks, and develops and evaluates a new framework aimed at overcoming their limitations. Methods A systematic search of electronic databases and consultation with behaviour change experts were used to identify frameworks of behaviour change interventions. These were evaluated according to three criteria: comprehensiveness, coherence, and a clear link to an overarching model of behaviour. A new framework was developed to meet these criteria. The reliability with which it could be applied was examined in two domains of behaviour change: tobacco control and obesity. Results Nineteen frameworks were identified covering nine intervention functions and seven policy categories that could enable those interventions. None of the frameworks reviewed covered the full range of intervention functions or policies, and only a minority met the criteria of coherence or linkage to a model of behaviour. At the centre of a proposed new framework is a 'behaviour system' involving three essential conditions: capability, opportunity, and motivation (what we term the 'COM-B system'). This forms the hub of a 'behaviour change wheel' (BCW) around which are positioned the nine intervention functions aimed at addressing deficits in one or more of these conditions; around this are placed seven categories of policy that could enable those interventions to occur. The BCW was used reliably to characterise interventions within the English Department of Health's 2010 tobacco control strategy and the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence's guidance on reducing obesity. Conclusions Interventions and policies to change behaviour can be usefully characterised by means of a BCW comprising: a 'behaviour system' at the hub, encircled by intervention functions and then by policy categories. Research is needed to establish how far the BCW can lead to more efficient design of effective interventions.

Building a Learning Culture – The case of the Market Development Facility in Fiji - Miehlbradt, Alexandra (The Donor Committee for Enterprise Development, 2015)
Keywords: Case Report

A pragmatic approach to assessing system change - Webinar (DCED, 2020)
Few topics inspire as much confusion and debate as systemic change. What is it? How do you measure it? Does it even matter? Assessing changes in systems might be more doable than you think. This webinar explored a back-to-basics approach to assessing system change. In November 2019, thirty results measurement specialists, managers and consultants got together in Bangkok. They took part in workshops on a back-to-basics approach to assessing system changes, applying it to cases from participants’ programmes. Since then, the insights from the workshop have been further developed into a pragmatic approach to assessing system changes that builds on what programmes are actually doing and learning from practice. It can be: applied by programmes using a variety of different systemic change frameworks applied across a variety of sectors implemented with internal resources using familiar methods for information gathering The speakers walked through the approach using examples from the 2019 workshop, including PRISMA in Indonesia and Skills for Jobs (S4J) in Albania.

A Pragmatic Approach to Assessing System Change: How to put it into practice - Miehlbradt, Alexandra; Shah, Rachel; Posthumus, Hans; Kessler, Adam (DCED, 2020)
Planning for and assessing system change is a strategic management issue. It is critical for everything from developing a strategy and designing interventions, to adapting strategy, improving implementation and reporting impact. But many programmes get stuck when it comes to assessing system change. The private sector development field has struggled to agree on an approach that programmes can implement and stakeholders can understand. However some mature programmes are starting to assess system change more effectively. Building on these emerging practices, this paper outlines a process that programmes can use to assess system changes regularly and practically. Two complementary papers: Overview and How to put it into practice The Overview summarises the approach and How to put it into practice provides more detailed implementation guidance, worked examples, and useful tips. The Overview explores how to: develop a system change strategy and intervention plans that lay the groundwork for system change assessment, including how to set system boundaries and how to identify the system changes a programme aims to catalyse assess system changes using both: - an intervention lens focused on changes introduced by specific interventions - a helicopter lens that provides a whole system view By analysing findings from both lenses, programmes can improve their strategy and report on their contribution to system change. How to put it into practice uses two case examples for illustration throughout the paper - PRISMA’s work in the maize system in East Java and Indonesia and S4J’s work in the Vocational Education and Training (VET) system in Albania. It targets practitioners responsible for facilitating and/or assessing system change. The paper explains how to: articulate the system changes that a programme aims to catalyse assess those changes use the results to inform decision making and reporting The approach described in the paper builds on the practices outlined in the DCED Results Measurement Standard. The guidance provided has been designed to be useful to programmes that aim to catalyse system changes whether or not they apply the DCED Standard.

Taking Stock of Empowerment Evaluation: An Empirical Review - Miller, Robin Lin; Campbell, Rebecca (American Journal of Evaluation, 2006)
Empowerment evaluation entered the evaluation lexicon in 1993. Since that time, it has attracted many adherents, as well as vocal detractors. A prominent issue in the debates on empowerment evaluation concerns the extent to which empowerment evaluation can be readily distinguished from other approaches to evaluation that share with it an emphasis on participatory and collaborative processes, capacity development, and evaluation use. A second issue concerns the extent to which empowerment evaluation actually leads to empowered outcomes for those who have participated in the evaluation process and those who are the intended beneficiaries of the social programs that were the objects of evaluation. The authors systematically examined 47 case examples of empowerment evaluation published from 1994 through June 2005. The results suggest wide variation among practitioners in adherence to empowerment evaluation principles and weak emphasis on the attainment of empowered outcomes for program beneficiaries. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

The Relational Work of Systems Change - Millgan, Katherine; Zerda, Juanita; Kania, John (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2022)
Collective impact efforts must prioritize working together in more relational ways to find systemic solutions to social problems. Sometimes we lose sight of a simple truth about systems: They are made up of people. Despite all of the frameworks and tools at our disposal and all of our learning as a field of practice, purely technical, rational approaches to systems change will not make much of a dent in shifting power or altering our most deeply held beliefs. If most collective impact efforts fall short of supporting people to change in fundamentally consciousness-altering ways, then, the system they are a part of will not significantly change either. However, over the past two decades, the prevailing view among many funders, board members, and institutional leaders has been that only quantifiable and predetermined outcomes can create impact. But if the interrelated, devastating, and deepening crises and divisions over the past two years have taught us anything, it is that complex, adaptive problems defy tidy logic models and reductive technical solutions. It is time to invest our collective energy in more relational and emergent approaches to transforming systems.

Buzzing Communities: How to build bigger, better, and more active online communities - Millington, Richard (Feverbee, 2012)
How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online CommunitiesBuzzing Communities cuts through the fluff to offer a clear process for creating thriving online communities. This book combines a century of proven science, dozens of real-life examples, practical tips, and trusted community-building methods. This step-by-step guide includes a lifecycle for tracking your progress and a framework for managing your organization's community efforts. This Book Will Help You to Understand what the members of your community really want. Dramatically increase the number of newcomers that become regulars. Avoid the mistakes most organizations make when they try to build online communities. Develop a fantastic, user-friendly website for your members. Grow your online community to critical mass and beyond Keep members engaged and active in your community. Measure the community's return on investment and explain the benefits to your organization.

The Indispensable Community: Why Some Brand Communities Thrive When Others Perish - Millington, Richard (Feverbee, 2018)
How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online CommunitiesBuzzing Communities cuts through the fluff to offer a clear process for creating thriving online communities. This book combines a century of proven science, dozens of real-life examples, practical tips, and trusted community-building methods. This step-by-step guide includes a lifecycle for tracking your progress and a framework for managing your organization's community efforts. This Book Will Help You to Understand what the members of your community really want. Dramatically increase the number of newcomers that become regulars. Avoid the mistakes most organizations make when they try to build online communities. Develop a fantastic, user-friendly website for your members. Grow your online community to critical mass and beyond Keep members engaged and active in your community. Measure the community's return on investment and explain the benefits to your organization.

‘You Have to Raise a Fist!’: Seeing and Speaking to the State in South Africa - Mills, Elizabeth (IDS Bulletin, 2016)

Evidence to Action: Research to Address Illegal Wildlife Trade - Milner-Gulland, E. J.; Cugniere, Laure; Hinsley, Amy; Phelps, Jacob; Rolfe, Michael 't Sas; Veríssimo, Diogo (2018)
Tools and expertise to improve the evidence base for national and international Illegal Wildlife Trade policy already exist but are underutilised. Tapping into these resources would produce substantive benefits for wildlife conservation and associated sectors, enabling governments to better meet their obligations under the Sustainable Development Goals and international biodiversity conventions. This can be achieved through enhanced funding support for inter-sectoral research collaborations, engaging researchers in priority setting and programme design, increasing developing country research capacity and engaging researchers and community voices in policy processes. This briefing, addressed to policy makers and practitioners, is part of the 2018 Evidence to Action: Research to Address Illegal Wildlife Trade event programme, organised by five of the UK’s most active IWT research institutions, to support the London 2018 IWT Conference.

Guidance Note for Adaptive Management - Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark (Government of Denmark, 2022)
This note explains what adaptive aid management is; why and when it should be considered; and how it should be applied. It covers all Danish development support channels and modalities, including bilateral country assistance, assistance to and through civil society, the private sector and to and through multilateral organisations. This guide has three chapters. Chapter 1 provides an executive overview of what adaptive management is. Chapter 2 goes deeper into five key operational principles of adaptive management. Chapter 3 details the main tenets of adaptive management processes during the programming cycle.

Guidelines for Country Strategic Frameworks Programmes and Projects - Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark (Government of Denmark, 2020)

(Mis)communicating climate change? Why online adaptation databases may fail to catalyze adaptation action - Mitchell, Carrie L.; Burch, Sarah L.; Driscoll, Patrick A. (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2016)
Over the last decade a plethora of action-oriented research projects has been conducted in developing countries, exploring how to effectively adapt to the anticipated impacts of climate change. Many intergovernmental agencies and development organizations have chosen to disseminate their research results via online databases. It is unclear, however, whether these databases are useful in terms of actual adaptation planning and implementation. A systematic review of online databases has found at least 64 databases and tools online related to climate change adaptation. Despite the abundance of databases, this analysis reveals that the existing body of online databases generally lack the structure and mechanics to identify, extract, and synthesize both effective and ineffective climate change adaptation practices, projects, programs, and policies. Even relatively basic information, such as identification of projects’ projected versus actual costs is absent, which are crucial decision-making criteria particularly in developing country contexts where resource constraints are significant. In this paper we evaluate these online tools with a focus on identifying features that potentially could contribute to knowledge sharing and successful exchange of climate change adaptation projects and practices within a developing country context. We conclude the paper with recommendations for how to improve efforts to communicate climate change research, such as more nuanced needs assessments of potential users of databases. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:600–613. doi: 10.1002/wcc.401 This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation Climate and Development > Knowledge and Action in Development Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice

Using elements of DCED Standards for CLA - Mitra, Bilash; Jalil, Mohammad Muaz (2018)
Introduction used in the DCED-BEAM seminar in Nairobi

Quality Flaws: Issues and Challenges in Software Development - Mohan, P.; Shankar, A. Udaya; JayaSriDevi, K. (Computer Engineering and Intelligent Systems, 2012)
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 these days. Organizations struggle in a treadmill race to deliver quality software to stay ahead with new technology, deal with accumulated development backlogs, handle customer issues as software teams work as hard as they can make their organizations stay alive and competitive in the market place. Software companies face an immense pressure to virtually release a bug-free product or a software package. The culture of an organization is a critical success factor in the efforts of process improvement. The paper aims at assessing quality as a function for monitoring and measuring the strength of development processes and any successful application development enterprise requires an unambiguous understanding of customer expectation and maximizing participation of customers in the development activities thereby ensuring that people involved in development activities do the right thing and do the thing right for delivering high quality software . Keywords: Software development, process improvement, software defect, bug-free product, software package

Building intentional networks that drive impact - Mohr, Jeff (In Too Deep, 2016)
These days everyone is familiar with some type of network — whether that’s their professional network on LinkedIn, their social network on…

Building intentional networks that drive impact (part 2) - Mohr, Jeff (In Too Deep, 2016)
This is part 2 of our series on building intentional networks. Make sure you’ve read part 1 before diving into this article!

EPE Week: Lee-Anne Molony on Collaborative Outcomes Reporting - Molony, L A (AEA365 a Tip-a-day by and for Evaluators, 2013)
This AEA365 blog, written by Lee-Anne Molony a Principal Consultant at Clear Horizon, provides a brief overview on Collaborative Outcomes Reporting (COR).

Lifestyle politics and the concept of political participation - Moor, Joost de (Acta Politica, 2017)
Van Deth’s comprehensive ‘conceptual map of political participation’ has reinstated a lively debate about the concept of political participation, and provides some compelling solutions to it. However, an important question that has been raised is whether van Deth’s map actually achieves its main goal of unambiguously identifying and classifying emerging, complex types of participation, like online political activism – or lifestyle politics. To contribute to this debate, this article aims to evaluate the usefulness of van Deth’s approach for the analysis of lifestyle politics. Such an evaluation requires a clear classification of lifestyle politics. This, however, is still missing from the literature. The second aim of this article, therefore, is to identify and classify different types of lifestyle politics. On the basis of a literature review, this article argues that lifestyle politics are often enacted throughout different private, public and institutional arenas, and that they are often targeted at various social, economic and political actors at once. Applying van Deth’s conceptual map to these empirical realities, then, suggests that it cannot always account for their complexity sufficiently. Therefore, this article proposes a modification of van Deth’s framework that increases its usefulness for analyzing emerging, complex political participation repertoires.

Adaptive Leadership in Development course - Moran, Mark; Curth-Bibb, Jodie; Grice, Tim; Glavey, Sarah (University of Queensland, 2017)

Embracing the Chaotic: Cynefin and Humanitarian Response - Morealtitude (WanderLust, 2010)
Note: Many thanks to Dave Snowden for his willingness to comment on this article prior to release Because I’m always a little behind the eight-ball, a friend of mine* recently introduced me to the …

Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated - Morieux, Yves; Tollman, Peter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014)
New tools for managing complexityDoes your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone.According to The Boston Consulting Group’s fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past sixty years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness—that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems—has increased by a whopping factor of thirty-five. In their attempt to respond to the increasingly complex performance requirements they face, company leaders have created an organizational labyrinth that makes it more and more difficult to improve productivity and to pursue innovation. It also disengages and demotivates the workforce.Clearly it’s time for leaders to stop trying to manage complexity with their traditional tools and instead better leverage employees' intelligence. This book shows you how and explains the implications for designing and leading organizations.The way to manage complexity, the authors argue, is neither with the hard solutions of another era nor with the soft solutions—such as team building and feel-good “people initiatives”—that often follow in their wake. Based on social sciences (notably economics, game theory, and organizational sociology) and The Boston Consulting Group’s work with more than five hundred companies in more than forty countries and in various industries, authors Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman recommend six simple rules to manage complexity without getting complicated.Showing why the rules work and how to put them into practice, Morieux and Tollman give managers a much-needed tool to reinvigorate people in the face of seemingly endless complexity. Included are detailed examples from companies that have achieved a multiplicative effect on performance by using them.It’s time to manage complexity better. Employ these six simple rules to foster autonomy and cooperation and to effectively handle business complexity. As a result, you will improve productivity, innovate more, reengage your workforce, and seize opportunities to create competitive advantage.
Keywords: Complexity; Design Thinking

Assumption-aware tools and agency; an interrogation of the primary artifacts of the program evaluation and design profession in working with complex evaluands and complex contexts - Morrow, Nathan; Nkwake, Apollo M. (Evaluation and Program Planning, 2016)
Like artisans in a professional guild, we evaluators create tools to suit our ever evolving practice. The tools we use as evaluators are the primary artifacts of our profession, reflect our practice and embody an amalgamation of paradigms and assumptions. With the increasing shifts in evaluation purposes from judging program worth to understanding how programs work, the evaluator’s role is changing to that of facilitating stakeholders in a learning process. This involves clarifying purposes and choices, as well as unearthing critical assumptions. In such a role, evaluators become major tool-users and begin to innovate with small refinements or produce completely new tools to fit a specific challenge or context. We interrogate the form and function of 12 tools used by evaluators when working with complex evaluands and complex contexts. The form is described in terms of traditional qualitative techniques and particular characteristics of the elements, use and presentation of each tool. Then the function of each tool is analyzed with respect to articulating assumptions and affecting the agency of evaluators and stakeholders in complex contexts.
Keywords: Agency; Assumption-aware; Complex context; Complex programs; Participatory approaches; Program design; Program evaluation; Program tools; Theory-based

Conclusion: Agency in the face of complexity and the future of assumption-aware evaluation practice - Morrow, Nathan; Nkwake, Apollo M. (Evaluation and Program Planning, 2016)
This final chapter in the volume pulls together common themes from the diverse set of articles by a group of eight authors in this issue, and presents some reflections on the next steps for improving the ways in which evaluators work with assumptions. Collectively, the authors provide a broad overview of existing and emerging approaches to the articulation and use of assumptions in evaluation theory and practice. The authors reiterate the rationale and key terminology as a common basis for working with assumption in program design and evaluation. They highlight some useful concepts and categorizations to promote more rigorous treatment of assumptions in evaluation. A three-tier framework for fostering agency for assumption-aware evaluation practice is proposed-agency for themselves (evaluators); agency for others (stakeholders); and agency for standards and principles.
Keywords: Agency; Complexity

Learning to make all voices count: Lessons and reflection on localising the Open Government Partnership - Moses, Michael (2017)
This report reviews the evidence from Learning to Make All Voices Count (L-MAVC), a programme funded by Making All Voices Count and implemented in collaboration with Global Integrity. L-MAVC intended to support six Making All Voices Count grantees, working in five countries, in co-creating and applying a participatory, learning-centred, and adaptive approach to strengthening citizen engagement in governance processes in their contexts, including with respect to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). Two overarching sets of lessons emerge from the experiences of L-MAVC grantees. First, supporting citizen engagement and government accountability in subnational contexts, and localising the OGP in ways that matter to citizens, is not straightforward. Doing so successfully entails engaging with, navigating and shaping political and power dynamics in those contexts, and iteratively adapting to emerging lessons and challenges. Second, the effectiveness of adaptive ways of working depends in part on the extent to which they offer opportunities for cross-context peer learning, support the regular collection and use of data, and are themselves adaptive. These lessons have implications for the broader community of actors working to support governance reform, including the OGP and its partners, donors and multilateral institutions, and practitioners and policy-makers. The evidence from L-MAVC suggests that if these actors are to contribute more effectively to reforms that affect citizens’ lives, substantial changes – with respect to the nature of support provided to domestic stakeholders and to grant-making practices – may be warranted

Rapid experiments with a purpose - Moses, Michael (BEAM Exchange, 2017)
New insights, opinions and perspectives on market systems development, from experts and practitioners.
Keywords: IMPORTANT

Learning how to go local: Lessons from six learning journeys for the Open Government Partnership - Moses, Michael; Soal, Sue (2017)
This brief reviews the evidence from Learning to Make All Voices Count (L-MAVC), a programme funded by Making All Voices Count, and implemented in collaboration with Global Integrity. L-MAVC intended to support six Making All Voices Count grantees, working in five countries, in co-creating and applying a participatory, learning-centred, and adaptive approach to strengthening citizen engagement in governance processes in their contexts, including with respect to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The evidence from L-MAVC suggests that supporting citizen engagement with, and use of, OGP, and improving the extent to which OGP commitments are shaped by and matter to citizens in subnational districts, is not straightforward. Findings suggest that efforts to broaden and deepen citizen engagement with OGP, including at subnational levels, may be more effective when combined with support that helps local OGP champions iteratively learn and adapt, and discover and apply localisation models that fit best in their contexts. OGP and its partners may strengthen the impact of the initiative, and indeed, the impact of those working to leverage OGP at and below country level, by making structured learning support more available to local reformers. Targeted advocacy, focused on institutionalising collaborative OGP processes, and on linking subnational action with National Action Plans (NAPs), may also be useful.

Learning to Make All Voices Count: Lessons for OGP, donors, and practitioners - Moses, Michael; Soal, Sue (2017)
The Open Government Partnership (OGP), donors and multilaterals, and social accountability practitioners across the world are among various constituencies attempting to harness and actualise emerging insights about the nature of successful governance reform. But each of these groups faces challenges as they do so. This brief reviews the evidence from Learning to Make All Voices Count (L-MAVC), a programme funded by Making All Voices Count, and implemented in collaboration with Global Integrity. L-MAVC intended to support six Making All Voices Count grantees, working in five countries, in co-creating and applying a participatory, learning-centred, and adaptive approach to strengthening citizen engagement in governance processes in their contexts, including with respect to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). Two sets of lessons emerge from the experience of L-MAVC. First, supporting citizen engagement and government accountability in subnational contexts, and localising OGP in ways that matter to citizens, is not straightforward. Doing so successfully entails engaging with, navigating and shaping political and power dynamics in those contexts, and iteratively adapting to emerging lessons and challenges. Second, the effectiveness of adaptive ways of working depends in part on the extent to which they offer opportunities for cross-context peer learning, support the regular collection and use of data, and are themselves adaptive. These lessons have implications for the broader community of actors working to support governance reform, including OGP and its partners, donors and multilateral institutions, and practitioners and policy-makers. If these actors are to contribute more effectively to reforms that affect citizens’ lives, substantial changes – with respect to the nature of support provided to domestic stakeholders, grant-making practices, and practitioner approaches – may be warranted.

Supporting local learning and adaptation: understanding the effectiveness of adaptive processes - Moses, Michael; Soal, Sue (2017)
This brief reviews the evidence from Learning to Make All Voices Count (L-MAVC), a programme funded by Making All Voices Count, and implemented in collaboration with Global Integrity. L-MAVC intended to support six Making All Voices Count grantees, working in five countries, in co-creating and applying a participatory, learning-centred, and adaptive approach to strengthening citizen engagement in governance processes in their contexts, including with respect to the Open Government Partnership (OGP).

Deciding Well in Tumultuous Times - Moss, Ian David (Smarter decisions for a better world, 2020)
Practical advice for donors and institutions responding to COVID-19

Supporting the policy environment for economic development (SPEED+) - Strategic Review Report - MSI (USAID, 2019)
Donor-funded policy reform has a long history in Mozambique, with United States Agency for International Development (USAID) efforts dating to the mid-1990s. Many laws and regulations adopted during the past quarter century are the consequence of these efforts. And yet, even with several years of robust economic growth, Mozambique has not experienced the broad economic transformation that policy reforms can trigger: per capita income in 2017 was $519 and more than 80 percent of the country lived on less than two dollars per day. The country ranks 180 out of 189 on the Human Development Index and 135 out of 180 on the World Bank’s Doing Business Index. Supporting the Policy Environment for Economic Development (SPEED+), a $37 million, four-year, USAID-funded program, represents the latest iteration of USAID’s policy reform efforts. SPEED+ began in August 2016 and is scheduled to run through August 2020. As the program passed the midway point, USAID commissioned Management Systems International (MSI) to conduct a strategic review (SR) of the SPEED+ program, with the objectives of advising on: • how to maximize the impact of SPEED+ during its final 18 months; • what type of follow-on program USAID should consider; and • what broader lessons can be drawn from SPEED+’s experience in Mozambique.

Collective intelligence and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals - Mulgan, Geoff (nesta, 2018)
Collective intelligence and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

Systems Innovation - Discussion Paper - Mulgan, Geoff; Leadbeater, Charlie (NESTA, 2013)
Introduction Over the past few years there has been growing interest in systemic innovation. We are defining this as an interconnected set of innovations, where each influences the other, with innovation both in the parts of the system and in the ways in which they interconnect. Yet rather than simply theorising, we want to make this practical. We want to explore the potential of systemic innovation to help tackle some of the key challenges the UK currently faces, from supporting an ageing population to tackling unemployment. We would also like to open up the discussion, to engage with the wide and diverse range of experts already working this space to help sharpen up thinking about systemic innovation and influence practical work to advance it. About this paper The two essays contained within this paper are intended to contribute to this debate. The first paper by Geoff Mulgan addresses a number of questions about systemic – or ‘joined–up’ – innovation, asking what it means to truly transform a system, encompassing the means, methods, and actions needed to realise its potential. The second paper from Charlie Leadbeater argues that companies, governments, cities, and entire societies need to move from seeing innovation in products and services as a source of competitive advantage, to focussing on innovation with entire systems. Our next steps: helping make systemic innovation useful and useable This report is just the start. We want to work with academics, practitioners, policymakers, and others in the field, to help realise the great potential of connecting and joining up innovative products, services and processes so that the whole is more than the parts. Over the coming months we will be building upon the rich and diverse literature available (we have start collating this as an annex to this paper), as well as practitioner experience, to ensure we understand systems more rigorously, as well as the skills, capabilities, methods and means needed to help them change for the better.

Grounded Theory Method in HCI and CSCW - Muller, Michael J; Kogan, Sandra (IBM Center for Social Software, 2010)

Six things that help grant-makers learn and adapt - Murray, Aoife (Itad, 2017)
There’s an emerging body of literature identifying key strategies that can both improve learning and enable adaptive management amongst grant-makers. We recently reviewed a host of publications from eight grant-making organisations. Those organisations have diverse aims and approaches but we’ve identified six common themes that stand out: Strong leadership and facilitation enables successful learning and …

The Promise of Lean Experimentation - Murray, Peter; Ma, Steve (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2015)
By adopting a model from business, nonprofit organizations can launch, test, and implement new programs and services more efficiently. Includes magazine extras.
Keywords: IMPORTANT

The open book of social innovation - Murray, Robin; Caulier-Grice, Julie; Mulgan, Geoff (Young Foundation & NESTA, 2010)

An analysis of factors influencing success of ICT4D projects: a case study of the Schools Computerisation Programme in Mashonaland West Province, Zimbabwe. - Musiyandaka, Donna; Ranga, Gideon; Kiwa, Jacqueline Fungai (The Journal of Community Informatics, 2013)
Keywords: ICT4D programmes; success factors

Addressing challenges in communicating adaptation practices to smallholder farmers in Kenya through a radio intervention - Mwaniki, Fiona Nyawira; Gichuki, Charity; Mwangi, Maina; Mburia, Pamela; Wandago, Benson (Journal of Agriculture and Environment for International Development (JAEID), 2017)

TICTeC 2018 - The Making All Voices Count programme: new lessons about donor-funded civic tech - mySociety (2018)
Keywords: Accountability; Civic Tech; IDS; TICTeC; transparency

How Does the World Bank Build Citizen Engagement Commitments into Project Design? Results from Pilot Assessments in Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, and Pakistan - Nadelman, Rachel; Le, Ha; Sah, Anjali (IDS, 2019)
How and to what degree is the World Bank putting its new institutional citizen engagement (CE) commitments into practice? This question guides an independent assessment that the Accountability Research Center (ARC) at American University has undertaken as part of the Institute of Development Studies-led Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme’s investigation into how external actors can best support local processes of and conditions for empowerment and accountability. This report investigates the World Bank’s incorporation of CE into project design, the critical early stage of donor engagement. To accomplish this, ARC reviewed the World Bank’s fiscal year 2015–17 investment project portfolios for four A4EA priority countries, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which covers 57 projects that range from US$19 million to U$600 million. The analysis determines whether projects commit to seeking a strategic approach to CE, which involves combining multiple tactics so that the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts. This assessment of CE commitments is intended to help to inform possible national, civil society organisation strategies to monitor whether and how these commitments are actually implemented in practice.

Participation and Power in Climate Change Adaptation Policies: Vulnerability in Food Security Programs in Nepal - Nagoda, Sigrid; Nightingale, Andrea J. (World Development, 2017)
The article explores the moments wherein participatory approaches in climate change adaptation (CCA) policies contribute to reinforcing, rather than transforming, the underlying causes of vulnerability. Using the case of food insecure households in the district of Humla in northwestern Nepal, the study demonstrates that the same social and power relations that are driving local vulnerability dynamics, such as caste, gender, and access to social and political networks, also play important roles in shaping the impact of CCA policies. By tracing Nepal’s CCA programs, starting with the local level, through district to international-national level dynamics, the study adds insights into the barriers to exclusion that embed power relations all the way through the chain of policy development. The purpose is to better understand how CCA can perpetuate rather than alleviate the conditions that create differential vulnerability patterns at village level. It raises questions about how whether CCA programs are an adequate response to increasing vulnerability for some of the world’s most marginalized people.

Voices of the poor: can anyone hear us? - Naraya, Deepa*Patel (The World Bank, 2000)
This book is the first in a three-part series, about the common patterns that emerged from the poor people's experiences in many different places. Chapter 1 sets out the conceptual framework and methodology. Chapter 2 discusses poverty from the perspective of the poor. Chapter 3 examines poor people's experience with the state, and includes case studies of access to health care and education. Chapter 4 addresses the nature and quality of poor people's interactions with civil society. Chapter 5 considers the household as a key social institution, and discusses gender relations within households and how these relations affect and are affected by larger institutions of society. Chapter 6 focuses on social fragmentation, and includes a discussion of social cohesion and social exclusion. Chapter 7 concludes the analysis and proposes some policy recommendations. The analysis leads to these conclusions: 1) poverty is multidimensional; 2) the state has been largely ineffective in reaching the poor; 3) the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the lives of the poor is limited, forcing the poor to depend primarily on their own informal networks; 4) households are crumbling under the stresses of poverty; and 5) the social fabric - poor people's only

Technical assistance: a practical account of the challenges in design and implementation - Nastase, Alexandra; Rajan, Alok; French, Ben; Bhattacharya, Debarshi (Gates Open Research, 2021)
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 implementing technical assistance, drawing from the existing literature and the authors’ experience in international development. The article summarises the latest thinking about delivering more effective development, including the adaptive management practices and the initiatives to strengthen evidence about what works. Finally, we complement this article with a follow-up open letter reflecting on the current policy options and opportunities for change.

The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development - Natsios, Andrew (The Center for Global Development, 2010)
In this essay, Andrew Natsios gives a first-hand account of what he finds most hinders USAID—layers of bureaucracy that misguide and derail development work.

Designing for Public Services - Nesta (Nesta/IDEO, 2016)

DIY - Development Impact and You: Practical Tools to Trigger and Support Social Innovation - Nesta (NESTA, 2014)
Keywords: IMPORTANT

Skills, atitudes and behaviours that fuel public innovation - a guide to getting the most from Nesta's Competency Framework for Experimenting and Public Problem Solving - Nesta (Nesta, 2018)

States of Change - Learning programme - Nesta (Nesta, 2018)

5 reflections on operationalising CLARISSA to generate evidence - Neupane, Sudarshan (CLARISSA, 2021)
As we start a new year, and especially, as 2021 is the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, understanding that the Worst Forms of Child Labour (WFCL) is complex is step one – there are no simple solutions. But we must go deeper than that, we must ensure that the programmes designed to intervene, and shape policy take on that complexity and precariousness. This is where the experience of the Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) programme comes in. It is uniquely set up to generate evidence in innovative ways and to co-develop with our stakeholders’ solutions to the WFCL. This is ambitious, yes, but no one said it was going to be easy.

Self Sabotage: Why Doing the Right Thing Results in Failure - Newell, Peter (War on the Rocks, 2020)
In January 2010 improvised explosive device (IED) attacks against dismounted infantry squads in Afghanistan numbered in the single digits — with only two

Life and death in the App Store - Newton, Casey (The Verge, 2016)
As last year began, the app developer Pixite held its company retreat at a converted Old West movie set outside of Palm Springs. They spent a few days dreaming about the future while eating...

6 Reviewing research evidence - NICE (6. Developing NICE guidelines: the manual, 2012)

A guide to Social Return on Investment - Nicholls, Jeremy; Lawlor, Eilis; Neitzert, Eva; Goodspeed, Tim (The SROI Network, 2012)
There is increasing recognition that we need better ways to account for the social, economic and environmental value that results from our activities. The language varies – ‘impact’, ‘returns’, ‘benefit’, ‘value’ – but the questions around what sort of difference and how much of a difference we are making are the same. Understanding and managing this broader value is becoming increasingly important for the public and private sectors alike. This is true whether it is civil society organisations working to create value, Governments commissioning and investing in activities to create social value, investors seeking to ensure that their investments will make a difference, or private businesses recognising both risk and opportunity in the wider effects of operations. All this means that it is also more important that we have some consistency and a shared language when we talk about value. SROI is the application of a set of principles within a framework that is designed to help bring about that consistency, whilst at the same time recognising that what is of value will be very different for different people in different situations and cultures. The first edition of this guide, which itself built on the work of three earlier SROI guides1, was prepared as part of a three year programme on measuring social value funded in 2008 by the then ‘Office of the Third Sector’ based in the Cabinet Office of the UK Government. This was delivered by a consortium of organisations: the SROI Network, nef (the new economics foundation), Charities Evaluation Services, the National Council for Voluntary Organsations and New Philanthropy Capital. In addition to this programme, the Scottish Government also supported the development of SROI, including a database of indicators to support SROI analysis. The work of the SROI Network now stretches across many different countries and continents, and this second edition of the guide reflects that interest. We have though decided to use only one currency symbol, for reasons of clarity and consistency, and so have continued to use £. However, readers will be able to find examples in various currencies and translations of the Guide on our website. For more information on the developments of SROI, please refer to the SROI Network website: www.thesroinetwork.org

The curious case of the realist trial: Methodological oxymoron or unicorn? - Nielsen, Steffen Bohni; Jaspers, Sofie Østergaard; Lemire, Sebastian (Evaluation, 2023)
Realist evaluation and experimental designs are both well-established approaches to evaluation. Over the past 10 years, realist trials—evaluations purposefully combining realist evaluation and experimental designs—have emerged. Informed by a comprehensive review of published realist trials, this article examines to what extent and how realist trials align with quality standards for realist evaluations and randomized controlled trials and to what extent and how the realist and trial aspects of realist trials are integrated. We identified only few examples that met high-quality standards for both experimental and realist studies and that merged the two designs.
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd

Guidance: Rigor and Reproducibility in Grant Applications | grants.nih.gov - NIH (National Institutes of Health, 2018)

Supporting accountability in fragile settings: A review for the Somalia Implementation and Analysis in Action of Accountability Programme - Nixon, Hamish; Buffardi, Anne; Wales, Joseph; Pasanen, Tiina (ODI, 2017)

From purposeful to meaningful adaptive programming: how about adaptive operations? - Nixon, Nicola (Devpolicy Blog from the Development Policy Centre, 2019)
Embracing adaptive programming approaches but sticking with rigid, traditional systems-based operations? It's time to take a long hard look at all the boring stuff, says Nicola Nixon.

Exploring a new governance agenda: What are the questions that matter? - Nixon, Nicola; Verhulst, Stefaan; Matin, Imran; Vermonte, Philips J. (From Poverty to Power, 2021)
The 100 Questions Initiative, pioneered by the GovLab, seeks to overcome the chasm between supply and demand. It begins not by searching for what data is available, but by asking important questions about the biggest challenges societies and countries face, and then seeking more targeted and relevant data solutions. In doing this, it narrows the gap between policy makers and constituents, providing opportunities for improved evidence-based policy and community engagement in developing countries. As part of this initiative, we seek to define the ten most important questions across several domains, including Migration, Gender, Employment, the Future of Work, and—now–Governance. On this occasion, we invited over 100 experts and practitioners in governance and data science –whom we call “bilinguals”– from various organizations, companies, and government agencies to identify what they see as the most pressing governance questions in their respective domains. Over 100 bilinguals were encouraged to prioritize potential impact, novelty, and feasibility in their questioning — moving toward a roadmap for data-driven action and collaboration that is both actionable and ambitious.

On the Right Tack: Reflections on Coalition-Building Initiatives across The Asia Foundation - Nixon, Nicola; Yates, Peter; Saluja, Sumaya; Yi, Su Lae; Lucas, Miranda; Bain, Katherine (The Asia Foundation, 2023)
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 modality, sharing insights about how externally supported coalitions emerge and function and contributing ideas about how such support can be adapted to other contexts. We hope that this paper and these case studies contribute to innovations in contemporary development theory and help practitioners use and move beyond some formulaic and technocratic modalities, such as traditional capacity development, knowledge transfer, and technical assistance. People, relationships, and working partnerships can then take center stage, and sustained cooperation will gain primacy over short-term outputs and deliverables.

Theory of change in ten steps - Noble, James (NPC, 2019)

The Knowledge-Creating Company - Nonaka, Ikujiro (Harvard Business Review, 2007)
Editor’s Note: This 1991 article helped popularize the notion of “tacit” knowledge—the valuable and highly subjective insights and intuitions that are difficult to capture and share because people carry them in their heads. Years later, the piece can still startle a reader with its views of organizations and of the types of knowledge that inform […]
Keywords: Creativity; Innovation; Product development; Research & development

The Design of Everyday Things, revised and expanded edition - Norman, Donald A. (MIT Press, 2013)
Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we try to figure out the shower control in a hotel or attempt to navigate an unfamiliar television set or stove. When The Design of Everyday Things was published in 1988, cognitive scientist Don Norman provocatively proposed that the fault lies not in ourselves, but in design that ignores the needs and psychology of people. Fully revised to keep the timeless principles of psychology up to date with ever-changing new technologies, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful appeal for good design, and a reminder of how – and why – some products satisfy while others only disappoint.

Experiential Learning: Fostering lasting behavioural change - Norton, Brittney M. (Mercy Corps, 2016)
The term ‘experiential learning’ is often mistakenly used to describe any learning experience that involves participatory activities. This paper presents an overview of what true experiential learning is and how this form of learning allows for real-world application - thus promoting lasting behavioural change. Furthermore, it explains how experiential learning was adopted as the methodological core of the Prospects psychosocial programme in Liberia, which builds ‘pre-employment skills’ in 3,500 vulnerable youth aged 15-24 years. The goal of the paper is to provide other youth and education development practitioners with a resource that can be used to strengthen youth and behaviour change programmes through the incorporation of the experiential learning theory. In addition, this paper explains its application in the Prospects programme, before concluding with key considerations of such a design. 1

Working the System: What We’ve Learned About Strengthening Accountability - Nugent, Sarah (Chemonics International, 2018)
When designing a new project, how often do we set out to strengthen a particular actor’s or institution’s ability to “hold government to account?” What does that mean exactly? Maybe the better question to ask is: what is the most effective way to strengthen accountability in our development work? And then, what does it look …

Using adaptive monitoring, evaluation and learning in programme design - Nzegwu, Femi (INASP, 2018)

Fractal approaches to scaling transformations to sustainability - O’Brien, Karen; Carmona, Rosario; Gram-Hanssen, Irmelin; Hochachka, Gail; Sygna, Linda; Rosenberg, Milda (Ambio, 2023)
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 characteristics that connect humans and nature in a coherent, acausal way. Drawing on the Three Spheres of Transformation framework, we consider how enacting universal values can generate fractal-like patterns of sustainability that repeat recursively across scales. Fractal approaches shift the focus from scaling through “things” (e.g., technologies, behaviors, projects) to scaling through a quality of agency based on values that apply to all. We discuss practical steps involved in fractal approaches to scaling transformations to sustainability, provide examples, and conclude with questions for future research.
Keywords: Agency; Fractals; Relational paradigms; Scaling; Three Spheres of Transformation; Universal values

Developing a Systems Thinking Lens for Collective Leadership - O’Donnell, Joan (Collective Leadership for Scotland, 2023)
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 political instability have become everyday realities that accompany an ever-widening gap between those who have and control resources, and those who do not have enough to meet basic needs. The usual responses are becoming more and more ineffective; all interventions have unseen consequences or emergent properties that cannot be predicted using an inputoutput outcomes model. Designing interventions therefore requires a fresh lens to manage our way through turbulence and uncertainty. Most complex situations benefit from a complementary mix of a systematic (linear) decisive intervention as much as a systemic (whole-view) understanding of a proposed intervention. In this sense, adopting a systems thinking approach requires both framing the situation using a systems lens, as well as a commitment to take action and learn forward in realtime. When utilised in this way, a systems thinking lens complements rather than replaces traditional management tools. It draws on well-tested concepts and tools and relies on the systems leader to develop their practice, which includes the art of knowing what is needed and when. It is about threading traditional planning methods together with an understanding of the interrelationships, multiple perspectives and boundary judgements that influence the framing of a situation. It is becoming increasingly clear that effective leadership is embedded and invested: objective management science has no place in a world bound by interconnectedness and unintended consequences. Leaders are, as we shall see, an inherent part of both the problem and the proposed intervention. The purpose of this paper is to share some concepts informed by systems thinking to support you, as leaders in your organisations, to bring a systems-informed lens to your work. It puts you as a practitioner-leader at the centre of your own practice and encourages you to reflect critically on your positionality, as well as the lens you use to understand and intervene in complex issues. This paper has been developed on foot of training piloted with public service leaders in Scotland in the summer of 2022, and acts as an introduction to developing your systems literacy skills. While we are all born with a systems sensibility, many of us lose that sense of connectedness and interdependence with the world as we grow up. This paper acts as a prompt to bring a complexity informed approach to your work practice. It also contains some pointers for further resources and tools that may support your learning.

Adaptive management: What it means for CSOs - O’Donnell, Michael (Bond, 2016)
Keywords: IMPORTANT

Is It Time for a New Paradigm for "Citizen Engagement"? The Role of Context and What the Evidence Tells Us - O'Meally, Simon (People, Spaces, Deliberation, 2013)
The meteoric rise of "citizen engagement" Almost all development agencies promote some form of citizen engagement and accountability, often framed as 'voice', 'demand-side governance', 'demand for good governance' or 'social accountability'. The current World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, recently put it that, "citizen voice can be pivotal in providing the demand-side pressure on government, service providers, and organizations such as the World Bank that is needed to encourage full and swift response to citizen needs". There has, in turn, been a mushrooming of useful operational guidance on different "tools" for social accountability - i.e. steps, inputs and methodologies - that guide discrete interventions, ranging from citizen score cards to participatory expenditure tracking. One might, however, be forgiven for thinking that some of the debates on citizen engagement need an injection of realism; especially as contextual factors can make or break a "tool's" implementation. A review of experience to date would be one good place to start.

Mapping Context for Social Accountability: A resource paper - O'Meally, Sion C. (The World Bank, 2013)

Using adaptive development to support feminist action - O’Neil, Tam (ODI, 2016)
This paper looks at how adaptive development is being applied by gender programmes and argues that gender and adaptive development communities have much to offer each other.

Doing legal empowerment differently: Learning from pro-poor litigation in Bangladesh - O'Neil, Tam; Valters, Craig; Farid, Cynthia (ODI, 2015)
Marginalised groups and their allies can, and do, use the law and justice systems, including public interest litigation, to improve their access to rights, goods and services.  Yet there is no automatic link between legal action and improved outcomes for poor people.  Where some minimum conditions are met – a progressive legal framework, a sympathetic judiciary and legal advocacy organisation – pro-poor litigation is a potential tool in disputes over rights and resources.  But concrete benefits for poor people also requires state action to enforce progressive rulings.  Much depends on whether claimants, legal activists and state reformers cooperate around shared interests, and whether activists can negotiate power and interest structures to motivate government action to implement rulings.  Effective strategies are those that link litigation with grassroots legal action and other forms of political and social activism and advocacy.  Donors need to fund legal advocacy organisations in ways that enable them to select social issues that are locally relevant and political feasible – and allows activists and reformers to work in politically smart and adaptive ways.

Key Concepts in Ethnography - O'Reilly, Karen (SAGE Publications, 2009)

Dynamic gridlock: Adaptive Humanitarian Action in the Democratic Republic of Congo - Obrecht, Alice (ODI/ALNAP, 2018)

Making humanitarian response more flexible: Challenges and questions - Obrecht, Alice; Bourne, S. (ALNAP/ODI, 2018)

More than just luck: Innovation in humanitarian action - Obrecht, Alice; Warner, Alexandra T. (Humanitarian Innovation Fund, 2016)
In South Sudan, a new water treatment system that provides a community with more clean water at a lower cost. In Sierra Leone, a poster explaining how to prevent the...

Evaluating Humanitarian Innovation - Obrecht, Alice; Warner, Alexandra; Dillon, Neil (ALNAP, 2017)

Doing Development Differently: Who we are, What we’re doing, What we’re learning - ODI (ODI, 2016)
In November 2014, the doing development differently community got together in Harvard to discuss what successful development interventions look like. Two years on, our community is broader than aid. It's broader than donors. It's about all organisations delivering change, producing real solutions to real problems that have real impact. It's about building trust, empowering people and promoting sustainability. Over the past two years, the community has been putting these ideas into practice across the world – being honest about what we are learning, including where we are not getting things right. This document aims to be an entry point for anyone interested in doing development differently. It explores the things that could be stopping you including: You are constrained by a disabling environment. You have strict reporting requirements. People aren't sold on the idea. It's easier to do things the way you've always done it. It's difficult to do in practice. If you are facing one, several, or all of these constraints, this document gives you a place to start. Using 43 case studies from practitoners within donors, governments, implementing organisations and NGOs across the globe, we aim to draw out some key lessons learnt, and give some advice for people considering this approach. These case studies are split across five categories: Swimming against the tide. Working in and with government. Feedback loops and data. Organisational change. Diffusion. Finally, if you want to know more, the document concludes with a suggested list of blogs and reports which explain these concepts in more detail.
Keywords: IMPORTANT

Strategy Development: Most Signficant Change (MSC) Toolkit - ODI (ODI, 2009)
The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique is a form of participatory monitoring and evaluation. It is participatory because many project stakeholders are involved both in deciding the sorts of change to be recorded and in analysing the data. It is a form of monitoring because it occurs throughout the programme cycle and provides information to help people manage it. MSC contributes to evaluation because it provides data on impact and outcomes which can be used to help assess the performance of the programme as a whole. Essentially, the process involves the collection of significant change (SC) stories emanating from the field level, and the systematic selection of the most important of these by panels of designated stakeholders or staff. The designated staff and stakeholders are initially involved by ‘searching’ for project impact. Once changes have been captured, various people sit down together, read the stories aloud and have regular and often in-depth discussions about the value of the reported changes. When the technique is successfully implemented, whole teams of people begin to focus their attention on programme impact. MSC has had several names since it was conceived, each emphasising a different aspect. Examples are: ‘Monitoring-without-indicators’ – MSC does not make use of predefined indicators, especially ones which have to be counted and measured; or the ‘story approach’ – the answers to the central question about change are often in the form of stories of who did what, when and why, and the reasons the

The Methods Lab evaluation toolkit - ODI (2016)
The Methods Lab develops and tests flexible approaches to impact evaluation for interventions that are harder to evaluate because of their complexity. This toolkit brings together analysis, guidance and templates for anyone: planning an impact evaluation designing a monitoring and evaluation system working in a consortium or managing a portfolio of projects

Applying Evaluation Criteria Thoughtfully - OECD (OECD, 2021)
Relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability are widely used evaluation criteria, particularly in international development co-operation. They help to determine the merit or worth of various interventions, such as strategies, policies, programmes or projects. This guidance aims to help evaluators and others to better understand those criteria, and improve their use. It starts by describing what they are, and how they are meant to be used. Then the definitions and concepts underpinning each criterion are explained. Finally, examples provide the reader with concrete ideas for using them. The criteria were originally laid out in the early 2000s by the Network on Development Evaluation (EvalNet) of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC). Although they have been widely used in evaluation, and beyond, this document is the first to comprehensively explore the concepts in detail, explain their intended use and offer practical guidance. It captures current thinking and best practice in evaluation, drawing on the inputs of internationally renowned evaluation experts from EvalNet and beyond.
Type: doi:https://doi.org/10.1787/543e84ed-en