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ManagementKnowledges

Development

Development

Planned intervention intended to achieve desired result?

An outcome of the influences of multiple stakeholders with diverse purposes on an socio-economic context which is always

– Complex– Dynamic– Unpredictable– Emergent

Knowledges

Evidence needed to make the correct decision?

'Dynamic, social and emergent'Multiple knowledges and knowledge cultures

– Disciplines– Roles– Perspectives

Related to power

Management

The control and direction of resources to achieve a desired result?

Capacity to create conditions for – Listening and understanding– Effective relationships– Appropriate interventions– Intelligent iteration

– Knowledge industry not a service industry

– Overlapping knowledge ecologies

– Based on 'knowledge initiatives' ranging from the simplest survey to the abolition of world poverty

The most significant benefits from innovativeinterdisciplinary initiatives are likely:

• To be different from those that were expected.• Not to be expressible in terms of the discipline that originated the initiative.• To involve new questions, or reformulation of objectives.• To be in the form of capacity to respond to future events, not past ones.• To arise after a long time – perhaps long after the initiative has formally ended.

These kinds of benefit are not easy to manage. (Blackwell et al 2010)

'Developing countries are therefore modernising, but in their own ways. Development proceeds through unexpected combinations of order and chaos, based on sediments of precolonial and colonial relations mixed with modern technologies, institutions and ambitions, with all this taking shape in an increasingly interdependent world'

van Lieshout p 86

Assessment

Why?- For accountability- To support management responsiveness- For broader learning

Meeting the plan is a very tepid indicator of success

Inherent problems- Causality- Overlapping interests- Time

Assessment 2

Whatever methodology is fit for purpose

- Measurement - Audit - Evaluative practice - Collective enquiry

All as a contribution to further reflection rather than as definitive fact

Conclusions

Definitely a challenge

Requires a transformation of the organisations on which we rely for funding and/or employment

A question of scienceA question of professionalism

'professionalization means having enough room to manoeuvre to be able to respond to the changing situation in the countries themselves, to experiment, to be part of a learning system, and to render account for the main framework of their interventions, rather than the details' van Lieshout P 202

Development

Assessment

ManagementKnowledges

Bibliography

Alan Blackwell, Lee Wilson, Charles Boulton and John Knell 'Creating value across boundaries: Maximising the return from interdisciplinary innovation' NESTA, 2010

Hearn S., le Borgne E. & Brown V, 'Monitoring and evaluating development as a knowledge industry' IKM Working Paper no 12, 2011

Le Borgne E., Brown V. and Hearn S., 'Monitoring and evaluating development as a knowledge ecology' IKM Working Paper no 13, 2011

van Lieshout P., Went r. and Kremer M. ' Less Pretension, More Ambition' WRR/ Amsterdam University Press 2010