October 22 – 23, 2014 | Harvard Kennedy School
A growing body of work shows that development interventions often have a limited impact, especially when targeting improved governance and service delivery by the state. This observation has inspired many efforts to rethink the practice of development, and a number of new strategies have emerged for designing, implementing and even evaluating development projects and initiatives.
In October 2014, Building State Capability (BSC) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), with funding from the Governance Partnership Facility, hosted a workshop titled ‘Doing Development Differently’, bringing together practitioners and researchers trying these new development practices or carrying out thorough analytical work on them. These employ different tools but generally hold to some of the same core principles: being problem driven, iterative with lots of learning, and engaging teams and coalitions, often producing hybrid solutions that are ‘fit to context’ and politically smart.
This event was an opportunity to share practical lessons and insights, country experience, and to experiment firsthand with selected methodologies and design thinking. It was the second session of the Untying Development series hosted by BSC, and the aim was to start building a shared community of practice, and to crystallize what we were learning about what doing development differently really looks like in practice.
The workshop ended with a strong call for developing a manifesto reflecting the common principles that cut across the cases that were presented. These principles were synthesized into The DDD Manifesto which was released in November 2014.