Why Adaptive Management is more important than ever. Lessons from an Indonesian Governance program. Maliki, Graham Teskey, Anna Winoto, and Michael Woolcock. In recent years, the term ‘adaptive management’ has lost some of its gravitas. As can often happen in the development sector, terminology can come in and out of fashion. However, adaptive management in …
Continue reading Responding to the COVID-19 crisis in Indonesia
Frameworks for applying political insight in practice. This blog forms part of a series of internal Political Economy Analysis (PEA) updates compiled by Priya Chattier/Tara Davda, with general wisdom by Graham Teskey and Lavinia Tyrrel. Thanks to Leisa Gibson/Priya for GESI support. We will aim to publish these every fortnight or so. Watch this space. …
Continue reading PEA Update 7: Working politically and adaptively in practice.
The final workshop in the Abt Associates 'Innovations in Governance' series was held on Tuesday 18 June in Washington DC. The topic: from thinking politically to working politically - are we really doing development any different? Moderated by Graham Teskey (Principal Global Lead - Governance, Abt Associates) the impressive list of speakers included: Duncan Green (Senior Strategic …
Ayesha from Papua New Guinea and Lilis from Indonesia* I sat down with Ayesha and Lilis (two rising stars from Abt-managed Australian Government funded aid projects in Indonesia and PNG) and said “tell me something interesting”. I was not disappointed. I was stuck by Ayesha’s idea of 'boundary riding’. Ayehsa – herself an Australian-Papua New …
Continue reading Boundary riding, dual worlds and critical friends: reflections from the field
By Duncan Green of Oxfam and the brains behind From Poverty to Power Spent yesterday at a Washington workshop on ‘From Thinking Politically to Working Politically’, organized by Abt Associates, whose Graham Teskey is one of the TWP gurus. What struck me most was the combination of the spreading acceptance of TWP approaches within the aid …
Continue reading Take-up and Doubt: where have we got to on Thinking and Working Politically?
By Tara Davda and Lavinia Tyrrel Aid is complex, and it is delivered in complex contexts. Any seasoned development practitioner would agree with this. For most of us, aid is about supporting positive change, and change necessarily means a renegotiation of power and resources. It means understanding the interests, motivations and incentives of those with …
I have always been interested in institutions[1], although I haven’t always been aware of it. As a child I remember wondering about the logic which underlay the admonition to keep one’s elbows off the dining table. I never dared ask, as my father was somewhat authoritarian. I remember thinking to myself, well, who says so? …
Continue reading Elbows on the table, traffic and institutions
The first blog discussed what donors could be looking for at tender, to ensure bidders can actually ‘do TWP’ in practice. This blog looks at what it takes for donors to incentivise TWP once implementation has begun. Drawing on our experiences mobilizing and managing three big facilities in Indonesia, Timor Leste and PNG, here’s what I …
By Bobby Anderson This blog accompanies the launch of our fourth working paper: found here. A researcher who spends long enough in Timor-Leste’s capital, Dili, will likely develop an impression of the countryside where most Timorese live, based on what many civil servants and development workers describe. Dire claims coalesce around a key set of …
Continue reading Reflecting on Front-line Service Delivery in Timor Leste
As I stumbled over the acronyms, feeling the unfamiliar syllables trip up my tongue, I reflected on a curiosity: the closer my work takes me to aid providers, the more I hear about Thinking Working Politically (TWP), Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) and Doing Development Differently (DDD).
As I exited my last position at The Asia Foundation, William Cole challenged me to: …report back in a year and tell me if its possible to think and work politically in high-value, multi-sector facility mechanisms So, after our involvement in three such 'Facilities' over the last 12-18 months[1], what is the verdict? Are we …
Deep and Wide? Or Wide and Shallow? At Sunday school sometime in the last century I remember singing with great gusto a chorus that included the lines “deep and wide, deep and wide, there’s a fountain flowing deep and wide…” Even today I can hum the tune (but not out loud as laryngectomees cannot sing. …
Governance and Development Soapbox 