Complexity
Engaging in a Complex World
In development studies and practice there are some key voices advocating for organizational changes. Ben Ramalingam, Duncan Green, Danny Burns and Stuart Worsley, Dave Algoso, and the USAID Learning Lab. They are calling for complexity and systems thinking to support more informed adaptive and iterative decision making and management. As these voices gain traction, and more […]
Tags: #Adaptive management #Complexity #Leadership #Shared consciousness #Team of Teams
Encountering Poverty
The 2016 book “Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World” brings together some of the insights draw from teaching in a critical undergraduate program. Roy, Negron-Gonzales, Opoku-Agyemang and Talwalker offer something between an edited volume and an undergraduate textbook, while also offering critical reflexivity of their own roles and positionality. The target audience […]
Tags: #Complexity #Education #International development #Poverty #Reflexivity
Post-doc: Social Innovation
University of Waterloo – Institute for Social Innovation and Resiliance One year fulltime postdoctoral fellowship: $50,000 annual salary, office and administrative support provided Supervision by Frances Westley, McConnell Chair in Social Innovation, and Dan McCarthy, Director of the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR) The University of Waterloo’s Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience […]
Tags: #Complexity #Post-doc #Resilience #Social Innovation #Transformation
Navigating Complexity in International Development
Danny Burns and Stuart Worsley offer one of the best development studies reads of 2015 with their book “Navigating Complexity in International Development: Facilitating Sustainable Change at Scale.” There are shelves of books that cover similar topics in development studies, with much repetition and little innovative thinking. Burns and Stuart offer just that by viewing […]
Tags: #Complex systems #Complexity #International development #Power #Sustainability
Viewing Complexity Through Life Histories
Thinking about people and objects as components in interconnected, non-linear and dynamic systems, rather than as compartmentalized and independent actors, began to take shape during the early 1900s with work by the biologist Von Bertalanffy. Throughout the last century, the systems approach was applied in a wide range of areas of inquiry, and has been used […]
Tags: #complex adaptive system #Complexity #Dynamic systems #Life History #Ramalingam
The Will to Improve (2007) Li
For anyone interested in international development, this is essential reading. The opening chapters of the book are academic, and I suspect this has contributed to it mostly being engaged with by academics. However, Li’s book is highly recommended for practitioners, even if that means skimming some parts. What follows is not a summary of The […]
Tags: #Complexity #Ethnography #Practice of Development #Rendering Technical #The Will to Improve
About me
Logan Cochrane
Associate Professor at HBKU in the College of Public Policy. He is an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences and an Adjunct Professor at Hawassa University (Institute for Policy and Development Research). Over the last fifteen years, he has worked in Afghanistan, Benin, Burundi, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Logan acts as a consultant for governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations, seeking to create bridges between research and practice.
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