written by Salimah Samji We offered 4 free PDIA online courses between November 2015 and June 2016. They were well received and 365 people, living in 56 countries, successfully completed the courses. In January 2017, we surveyed the 365 PDIA course alumni to learn whether (and how) they are using PDIA in their day-to-day lives. 113 (31%) of…Continue Reading PDIA Course: Alumni are already practicing what they learned
written by Salimah Samji We are delighted to inform you that our PDIA book entitled, “Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action” was just published by Oxford University Press. The book presents an evidence-based analysis of development failures and explains how capability traps emerge and persist. It is not just a critique, it also offers a way of…Continue Reading Download the new PDIA book for free
On 17 November 2016, ODI, in collaboration with the Building State Capability program at Harvard University, convened a private workshop bringing together a number of actors from academia, civil society, and donors, to look at how the adaptive development agenda has been put into practice throughout the world. We attempted to draw out some lessons…Continue Reading Doing development differently: two years on, what are we learning?
written by Salimah Samji We are delighted to announce our new PDIA: Notes from the Real World blog series. In this series we will share our lessons from our PDIA experiments over the past five years, on how to facilitate problem driven, iterative and adaptive work . We will also feature some guest blog posts from…Continue Reading The “PDIA: Notes from the Real World” blog series
Need help decoding the acronym PDIA? Check out the PDIA anthem. This Anthem uses the Instrumental from Mos Def – Mathematics. It was made by a very talented student as part of an assignment for Matt Andrews course entitled Getting Things Done in Development. We had never imagined that we could write a song about…Continue Reading The PDIA Anthem
We are delighted to release The DDD Manifesto as an outcome of the 2014 Doing Development Differently (DDD) workshop. In late October, a group of about 40 development professionals, implementers and funders from around the world attended the DDD workshop, to share examples where real change has been achieved. These examples employ different tools but…Continue Reading Introducing The DDD Manifesto
As you may have noticed, our website was antiquated, to say the least. The task of giving it a makeover has been on the back burner for a while now. We are proud to finally announce that our new website is live! The site provides an overview of PDIA, links to our blog and lists…Continue Reading BSC website gets a makeover
Matt Andrews teaches a course entitled “Getting Things Done: Management in the Development Context,” at the Harvard Kennedy School. He often gets asked about what he teaches in his course. So, he has decided to experiment with blogging about his course after every class. Each blog entry will include his powerpoint presentation, his syllabus, required…Continue Reading Follow “Getting Things Done” at the Harvard Kennedy School
The coherence and effectiveness of engagement with the world’s ‘fragile and conflict-affected states’—beyond ethical imperatives and geo-strategic considerations—turns on answers to two vexing questions. First, on what defensible basis is any given country, at any given historical moment, deemed to be (or not to be) ‘fragile’? Second, if a defining characteristic of state fragility is…Continue Reading The role of PDIA in fragile states
We are proud to announce that Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation co-authored by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock won the Faculty Article Award from the Sociology of Development Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The award ceremony was held in San Francisco on August…Continue Reading BSC Paper wins ASA award
