Ten Traps to Avoid if Aid Programming is Serious About Engaging with Context - Lessons from Afghanistan

These are problems that can only be solved by policymakers (including program managers working for donors, IFIs, and philanthropies) reclaiming their roles as bridges between rigorous academic research and policy formulation and implementation. That means internalizing the fact that the craft of policymaking is both an art and a science. Socio-hist... See more

Secondly, specialists toil within a singular tradition and apply formulaic solutions to situations that are rarely well-defined. This often results in intellectual acrobatics to justify one’s perspective in the face of conflicting data.

“The key lesson here is that if we are to intervene, we need a solid idea of not only the benefits of our interventions but also the harm we may cause—the second and subsequent order consequences. Otherwise, how will we know when, despite our best intentions, we cause more harm than we do good?”

What I've come to recognise as core to my practice is the challenge of taking an extraordinarily complex, integrated, incomplete problem and wrapping my arms around it conceptually in a way that helps and empowers practitioners to actually do things about it.

The outcome of these visionary projects, as described in detail by Scott, is nearly always a complex but dead system. A city void of life, with empty streets, unused buildings, unhealthy forests, poorer people. The high modernist visionary falls victim to their overconfidence, and skips over building the simple systems that work first.

What we want ... See more

. The MLP provides a radically large, spatio-temporal matrix within which to frame a problem and consider both the material (artifacts/processes/guidelines/ policies/technology/environmental factors etc.) and the non-material (worldviews, cultural/professional norms, values etc.) factors that give rise to the problem and that are barriers to positi... See more

To agree on tradeoffs collectively, tradeoffs have to be made explicit, then negotiated between stakeholders.