I have been fortunate enough to spend much of the last three months working on the designs of several health and governance programs across PNG, South Asia, and Africa. One thing that has struck me, regardless of which donor or country we work in, is the ongoing confusion in the aid industry regarding theories of …
Tag: program implementation
Boundary riding, dual worlds and critical friends: reflections from the field
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
Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning for Complex Programs in Complex Contexts: Three Facility Case Studies
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 …
Three challenges for ‘politically smart’ programming (and me)
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).
Governance and Development Soapbox 