Theory in Practice

I ’ve recently completed a number of missions for M&E purposes across Asia and the Pacific, and although there is always a sense of satisfaction of ticking the box on all of your deliverables, of knowing your client is pleased with the results, there is perhaps a greater satisfaction in what you can take away from each experience to build your own knowledge and try to use in your next assignment, to make development work just a bit more accountable and a bit… more. Measuring Innovation in Laos Nearly 10 years after drafting guidelines for the country office of an international organization on how to implement results-based monitoring and evaluation, I’ve discovered that a) not only have those guidelines been disseminated and used regionally, but b) they haven’t been updated (10 years!!??) and c) we’ve changed what we want to measure but not the tools we are allowed to measure the changes we effect with. Sigh.

Yo u have to admit, there is a lot of good writing out there. Such is the wonder of the internet and the ability of people to give their ideas and opinions a voice. I’m a proponent of this, particularly of those writers (professional and ad hoc) who have something truly meaningful to say. 2017 was, to my mind, a seminal year for some very excellent writing, largely to the shifting world around us. Below is the list of the top five articles which both inspired and challenged me last year, despite the fact that we are well into 2018. Coming in a number five, ‘ Why Expertise Matters .’ What with ‘fake news’ and, sadly, the terrible opinions based on conjecture and absolutely no fact, people with actual expertise have to compete not just with other people with expertise, but more often than not, people who know nothing about anything but like to feed their egos. Differentiating fact from fiction used to be a simile, but now? It is a full-time job and rarely does that mean that fact (and...

Originally Published in Al Jazeera http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/arms-embargo-myanmar-save-rohingya-170924081030160.html The past couple of weeks have seen a flurry of statements and op-eds demanding that the international community do something to stop the ethnic cleansing of the  Rohingya  in Myanmar. Among the demands made of the international community was the implementation of an arms embargo by the UN Security Council. In a report published on 17 September,  Human Rights Watch  requested that "The Security Council should urgently place a travel ban and asset freeze on those responsible for grave abuses and impose a comprehensive arms embargo against Burma, including prohibiting military cooperation and financial transactions with key military-owned enterprises."

I try to keep up to date on developments and trends on a variety of international development topics - my ties to the Pacific mean that I spend a significant amount of time exploring ideas and opportunities around climate resilience. So there’s a backlog of articles on the topic bookmarked on my computer. This morning I sat down to go through a few of them and was less than impressed. So much of what is discussed in terms of climate resilience focuses on how advanced government plans and programmes are. In truth, government plans, programmes and financing make a huge difference in the lives of the most vulnerable and in the most climate-vulnerable countries like the Pacific and other LDCs. Good points were made in the article I read this morning, breaking down the essentials, keeping it simple. The problem, for me, was that it didn’t touch on the human element. Those of us working in international development sometimes forget that - caught up as we are in our own plans and budgets ...

I read recently that we see diminishing creativity in society because we are too busy. We never take time to let our minds empty to allow those ‘ah ha!’ moments in. This is probably true. But I had a ‘seriously, it took me that long to realize that?’ moment this morning. Like, full on, I’d-like-to-go-back-and-rewrite-an-entire-evaluation kind of moment. And it all hinged on the confluence of events. The first took place over my morning coffee, reading a recent Guardian Development Pros article ‘ Development is Not a Science and Cannot be Measured .’ Indeed, it is not (as I’ve argued here before). Despite all the tools and academic and policy maker claims to the contrary, there are too many variables in development for any of us to explicitly state ‘A therefore B’. And we know this (those of us who do the work day in and day out and try to meld development policy with practicality and bare bones reality). The second took place at the gym a short while later as I was reading ‘Aid on the ...

Can donors promote reform while not undermining ownership? Is conditionality, or the requirement that aid recipients undertake certain actions in return for the provision of that aid, inherently inconsistent with an ownership agenda? So asks Matt Dornan in an interesting blog post discussing ownership and aid effectiveness. His post may focus on conditionality and ownership, but it links to another issue: that of how aid is delivered to countries, and how delivery mechanisms impact ownership. It all circles back to aid effectiveness and one big question: is the onus for aid effectiveness on the donor or the recipient? I would be willing to go all in and say the onus is on the donor. Why? Because the delivery mechanism, the conditions and the type of aid (see our post from last week ) are the prerogative of the donor.

There was a series of three articles recently on cash versus programme aid in Papua New Guinea. The essence of the articles was to discuss which form of capacity building assistance is better - through advisors or through budget support. Obviously, we all have our own opinions on this topic, and it has been written about frequently. However, some of the main themes of development effectiveness are 'ownership' and 'on-budget' programming, so the issues raised in the PNG case are due our consideration.