This week, ODI launched the World Bank’s 2017 World Development Report: Governance and the Law. In his keynote address, Rory Stewart, Minister of State for International Development, eloquently and sometimes irreverently highlighted some of the report’s implications: that it ‘liberated’ governance from its silo, making the connection to security and economic development; showed humility about the role of outsiders; and gave a real sense of ‘the local’ – the diversity of contexts around the world.
These highlights reflect many of the principles of ‘Doing Development Differently’ (DDD) – a community I’ve been proud to help convene since 2014.
To do development differently, people need to recognise the need to engage with complex social, political and economic systems; that many of today’s big challenges require shifts in incentives and behaviours; and that this means there is no blueprint to follow.
Testing, learning and adapting are needed; working with reform leaders to identify solutions that are a good fit to the problem and context at hand.
However, changing incentives is difficult. Instead of tackling complexity, it’s easier to just focus on vaccines and other things we can easily control. But over the last few years, I think there has been a subtle shift: from lamenting this problem, to actually trying to put DDD principles into action and work more adaptively.
One example is the quiet reforms underway within the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) to make their programmes more adaptive.
