Last year, Diana Cammack and I concluded our book on Governance for Development in Africa with the thought that more aid for development should be delivered by organisations that are not donor agencies. Successful facilitation of institutional change is about problem solving. That means getting and retaining serious local knowledge. It means working in an adaptive, learning-oriented way. It excludes solution-driven approaches that try to implement detailed plans according to a blueprint. It seems doubtful, we argued, that official development agencies will ever achieve the quality of understanding and the management flexibility that this implies. Therefore, donors should be doing more things 'at arm's length', delegating assistance to organisations that have demonstrated ability to work in the required ways. One year on, the debate on these themes is evolving fast. Additional evidence has piled up on the value of an adaptive, problem-driven (PDIA) approach to institutional change. New connections have been made with fields outside of development where the prevalence of complexity and uncertainty has similar effects. Importantly, more case studies have appeared, providing real examples of 'entrepreneurial' development work, politically smart locally led (PSLL) development and arm's-length funding, including evidence of superior impacts. Some of these - the latest [...]
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