IRC’s Patrick Moriarty in his recent blog post It’s the (political) economy stu…, proposed a model on evidence only being as good as the political economy in which it operates, is picked up in the blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos. This blog is exploring complexity and evolutionary sciences in foreign aid.
Published on: 23/09/2011
IRC’s Patrick Moriarty in his recent blog post It’s the (political) economy stu…, proposed a model on evidence only being as good as the political economy in which it operates, is picked up in the blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos. This blog is exploring complexity and evolutionary sciences in foreign aid.
Ben Ramalingam did this in Results 2.0: Towards a portfolio-based approach on June 30, 2011:
“The international development sector has been in a tug of war around the ‘results agenda’ for the past few months. This post explores the tensions and suggests a way to bring the sides together by focusing on the relevance and appropriateness of different approaches.*
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“So what to do to move beyond the ‘tug of war’? I would argue that a first step would be to think about how to bring the different results approaches together to establish a more constructive dialogue. What is needed is a more flexible and differentiated approach to results, one which takes account of the diversity of the development and humanitarian portfolio.”
Mr. Ramalingan proposes a Draft ‘Portfolio of Results’ Framework'. What might such a portfolio-based approach look like? There are a number of useful approaches from academia, civil society and business strategy that can help here. These include Brenda Zimmerman’s simple-complicated-complex distinction, the Cynefin framework of Cognitive Edge, work done by Alnoor Ebrahim at Harvard University, work done by Eliot Stern on relevance of different approaches to impact assessment and finally a recent model put forward by Patrick Moriarty of IRC.
All of these suggest in their different ways that appropriate strategic approaches (and by extension, results approaches) need to be based on:
(a) the nature of the intervention we are looking at, and
(b) the context in which it is being delivered.
Reading across these approaches we can suggest a preliminary framework which may prove useful in bringing together different results approaches in a productive and mutually beneficial way.
Patrick Moriarty wrote in his blog on May 31, 2011
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Evidence is important. But if impact is what you are after, then evidence is only as good as the political economy in which it operates. Or, put another way, evidence will only lead to impact where political-economy/governance/management (call it what you will) are good enough to demand it, understand it, and act on it. Indeed I believe that lack of demand for evidence is in itself a symptom of poor governance.
Much of the work that I am involved in with IRC revolves around trying to bring about sector change that leads to an environment where evidence is demanded and appreciated.
Thinking about this, it strikes me that the size and relative importance of what we could call the ‘Randomized controlled trial (RCT) space’ (the set of conditions where RCTs are an appropriate and useful approach to evidence building) in the wider political-economy is governed by a combination of the relative simplicity of the approach being tested, and the ‘strength’ of the political-economy. Which is what this little diagram attempts to show: the conditions under which RCTs are likely to be (cost) effective, and where less so.
Randomized controlled trial (RCT) space
