Playing the Game to Change the Rules?

This website archives the resources, and debates and 60 separate blogs of the international Big Push Forward Initiative (2011-2013)  that culminated with a conference bringing together from all over the world 100 development professionals and scholar activists. The conference provided an opportunity to share and strategize for people working on transformative development, and who are trying to reconcile their understanding of messy, unpredictable and risky pathways of societal transformation with bureaucracy driven protocols. We distinguished between the big ‘E’ (evidence of what works or not) and small ‘e’ (evidence about performance) and the interaction between these.

One of the outputs from the Conference is a book to be published by Practical Action in 2015  The Politics of Evidence in International Development: Playing the Game to Change the Rules?  edited by Chris Roche, Rosalind Eyben and Irene Guijt and . The book brings together and further develops papers and case studies selected from among those presented and discussed at the Conference.

Our book will explore the history of the ‘results’ agenda and the consequences for development practice. In doing so it attempts to explore the external and internal political factors and drivers of the push for evidence, results and value for money in development agencies. Using a range of conceptual, theoretical and practical material an analysis of strategies that enable more transformative approaches to results and evidence within the sector is presented.

Provisional content and titles

Rosalind Eyben

&  Chris Roche                      Introduction

Rosalind Eyben                    Uncovering the Politics of Evidence and Results’

Brendan Whitty                    Mapping the Results Landscape

Cathy Shutt                             The Politics and Practice of Value for Money

Chris Roche                            Juggling Multiple Accountability Disorder

Janet Vähämäki                    The results agenda in development cooperation

Vicky Johnson                        Valuing Children’s Knowledge: Is Anybody Listening?

Ola Abu Al Ghaib                  Aid Bureaucracy and Support for Disabled Peoples’ Organizations

Bernward Causemann

& EberhardGohl                Unwritten Reports: An NGO Collective’s Lessons for  Reporting

Marjan van Es

& Irene Guijt                         Theory of Change as next ‘Best Practice’?  The Experience of Hivos

Irene Guijt                              Conclusion: Strategies, Gaps and Potential