written by Matt Andrews In 2010, Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock and I started writing about PDIA (problem driven iterative adaptation) as a potential approach to do development differently. We had been observing that many development initiatives were not yielding anticipated results, and more importantly not building any kind of capability in developing country governments. We…Continue Reading Knowing through doing, and learning
written by Lant Pritchett Improving “accountability” has been a popular agenda for improving public sector performance for some time, and I have promoted accountability as a key to effectiveness myself. In reviewing Dan Honig’s new book, Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn’t Work, I want to make a…Continue Reading Account based accountability and Aid Effectiveness
written by Tim O’Brien and Salimah Samji We launched a pilot course entitled “The Practice of PDIA: Adapting to Climate Change,” in September 2017. This was our first attempt at customizing our free, PDIA online course to a specific theme of development problems. Our motivations in choosing climate change adaptation as an anchor for the…Continue Reading PDIA and Climate Change Adaptation
written by Matt Andrews We have a small team in Pretoria this week for the second year of PDIA work with the Collaborative African Budget Initiative (CABRI). The work with CABRI will see us working with 6 more African countries on public financial management reform problems. This experience will increase the number of teams that…Continue Reading Introducing The PDIA in Practice Series
From left to right: Jose Arocha, Matt Andrews, Marco Midence and Jorge Jimenez. Over the past 10 weeks, Matt Andrews has been working with a team of three mid-career students from Latin America on a project applying the problem analysis in PDIA to the challenge of growth in Honduras. We had shared their fishbone diagram in…Continue Reading Using PDIA to Decode Growth in Honduras
We hosted Dan Honig a few weeks ago to discuss his new book published by Oxford University Press. Here are some highlights….Continue Reading New Book: Navigation by Judgment
We have been told many times that the acronym PDIA is clunky and that it doesn’t easily roll off the tongue. Matt Andrews’ response to that has been, “it doesn’t matter what you call it, it matters that you do it.” BUT in order to do it, you need to first understand what it is. We are…Continue Reading Watch our new PDIA video!
written by Salimah Samji When we launched the first PDIA online course in November 2015, we had a burning question: Is it possible to teach PDIA in an online environment? To answer this question, we essentially PDIA-ed our way forward by learning, iterating, and adapting our online course – and the answer is a resounding YES! As…Continue Reading PDIA Course: Taking the classroom to the field and the field to the classroom
written by Tim O’Brien Leader of farming cooperative in central Sri Lanka that diversified into ginger production as drought increasingly hurt rice cultivation. If you live in a developed country, odds are that you think about climate change as something that will harm future generations — your children or your grandchildren perhaps. But if you…Continue Reading We recently ran a PDIA course on climate change adaptation. Why?
written by Matt Andrews We at the Building State Capability program have the good fortune of working with amazing practitioners from all over the world, and on topics of real importance. This semester, for instance, I am working with a team of three mid-career students from Latin America on a project applying the problem analysis…Continue Reading PDIA for growth in Honduras: A student project with major promise
