FYI: What We're Reading

[David Jacobstein]

Hi all,

I hope the close of the year is bringing everyone a moment of respite and a chance to reflect on the past year and look forward to the new. Here are some of the things we've been musing on over the last months, leading with several big events and papers:

• I've been waiting for a while for a robust ex-post evaluation of social accountability in the Dominican Republic to be published, and am really excited that I can finally share this research. By tracing shifts over a longer timeframe, starting not with a given project but with the local system and the actors in it, the research surfaces layering or the way specific, timebound projects both add to and draw on earlier work, particularly that which developed social capital, relationships, and shared understandings, even as key people moved into and out of different roles in the education system. This helps avoid the mistake of seeing change as a reflection of a single project and its choices, and instead learn from those who pushed change forward on what they did over time, how they leveraged different projects to help, and how they reacted in different situations to pursue goals spanning but broader than donor objectives.
• You can hear a bit more about the above research as part of a fantastic panel that I had the privilege to help organize during the LCS Forum. Rachel Gondo-Magama provided excellent synthesis of her experiences around which capacities she has seen matter most to local actors as they pursue reforms ranging from service delivery to accountability; she highlighted the importance of supporting actors to understand system structures including less visible connections and understanding the people who constitute a local system linked to technical knowledge, as well as enabling "strategic savinness" to navigate such spaces. She also noted the importance of balancing diversity coherently, so that networks can both leverage relationships to be effective but also address power asymmetries through trust and breadth, linking this to the capacity to adapt and self-renew. Really, a tour de force discussion weaving together systems thinking, political economy, and local capacity. Flor Guerzovich then walked through some of her research and the evidence base around what works to strengthen relational capacity through facilitation and orchestration. This is one of the best short discussions of these topics I've seen, really worth a listen.
• As referenced in the prior discussion, this fall also saw the release of the Local Systems Position Paper, an update to the Local Systems Framework and a chance to articulate new directions and agendas in promoting systems practice. It's been a lot of work drawing on systems thinkers from across our community. I also have to share this reaction to the paper from systems practice exemplar Alan Hudson. We hope many of you will join us in the systems practice journey!
• You can hear more about the Local Systems Position Paper and related themes from lead author Rachel Leeds, Monalisa Salib, and me on a podcast, part of a new series from Abt on systems practice for development (I also really enjoyed their pilot episode on portfolios and am looking forward to the rest)
• Tom Aston organized a truly tremendous roundup of the state of play in evaluations, including a host of embedded research and links; I particularly liked this webinar on scale and also this reflection from thought leader Patricia Rodgers on the appropriate role of evaluation in this context and how it can build more and offer more learning than simple retrospective engagement. The entire article represents a clear review of multiple, competing perspectives around what we can know and how we can know it in development work.
• Perhaps connected, another article going through a robust engagement on the work of fostering relationships, its distinction from simply buying goods or services, and how this therefore links to both limitations on "smart buys" and more broadly should inform choices of tools to generate and disseminate knowledge. In particular, this illustrates the problem that assumptions underpinning a paradigm of "smart buys" - the replication of proven interventions as silver bullets that just work - is rooted in the tractability of issues to techniques. It's not just that RCTs aren't a good fit for looking at relationships, systems change, and iterative learning; it's that those topics are deliberately downplayed in particular evidence discussions because they aren't tractable to preferred evaluation techniques. And yet, as Aston shows, there are numerous research and learning paradigms generating powerful evidence about what works in these spaces; it's just a matter of absorbing their lessons into technical guidance and fostering rigor and clarity within the tools appropriate to those spaces.

A number of other resources to highlight:

• For those who prefer other media formats, a nice video from the UNDP sandbox on their efforts to find a middle ground between reacting to emergence and making predictions; you can find a related practitioners' take here with some highlights
• Connected to the above, the start of a series on how work on behavioral science can address complexity;
• A short review of how gender and faith norms can interrelate to corruption as well as help tackle it;
• A synthesis of anti-corruption evaluations and the takeaways of what they suggest to improve such programming, and a related review of anti-corruption evaluations, suggesting broader mechanisms and pathways than typically envisioned, reminding me of the middle range theories identified by practitioners and synthesized in the social accountability 3.0 framework;
• A nice roundup of recent articles and research on the role of coalitions, a hot topic in various spaces;
• Review of an interesting book on popular action in Bangladesh
• Shared through the TWP COP, a review of how TWP has been undertaken in Sudan by those close to the action
• Most of you (those on the DRG Learning listserv) have probably already seen the Tuesday Group on Greg Power's Inside the Political Mind, but it's a great watch if you haven't, a thorough review of his research and its implications into the (predictable) way incentives shape political actors' behavior in ways that often seem unanticipated by donors - relatedly, here's a well observed article from TAF on the Ripple Effects of Politicians
• A fantastic post from Monalisa Salib on how to recruit and empower adaptive senior managers
• Perspectives from practitioners highlighting how monitoring and learning is matching with TWP, in the form of a fishbowl video;

I hope that this offers some holiday cheer, and wish the best to everyone for a Happy New Year!

Best,

David

David Jacobstein 

DRG Policy, Learning and Integration Office

United States Agency for International Development

T: (202) 390-1333

djaco...@usaid.gov

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[Florencia Guerzovich]

Hi all 

Thanks David for including in the list some of my 2024 highlights! 

For those interested in anti-corruption evaluation and learning. Here is a podcast where Tom Shipley (the author of the documents that David included in his list), Robert Barrington and I chat about the findings and our perspective regarding the state of MEL in anticorruption. Interestingly, we reflect on the comparison between our findings in anticorruption and   Social Accountability 3.0,. We have a different twist/perspective,  though. 

Best and looking forward to continuing the conversation in 2025! 

Flor

Florencia Guerzovich

https://www.linkedin.com/in/m-florencia-guerzovich-9b3ab74/

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