We distil and validate a new theory of organisational learning (OL) to understand OL in foreign aid agencies. Reviewing existing scholarship on OL in the public sector, we devise a theorectical framework consisting of three variables that connect interacting dimensions co-determining the organisation-specific intensity of OL: (1) individual knowledge acquisition, (2) social practices and (3) organisational political embeddedness. To validate our approach to studying OL empirically, we heed calls for more comparative research on OL by analysing 89 randomly sampled interviews with national development bureaucrats in Germany, South Korea and Norway. Our analysis demonstrates that our theoretical framework explains varying intensities of OL across the three cases. Crucially, it reveals the second dimension, social practices, to be decisive. While all cases in our sample contain evidence of individual learning and awareness of the organisations’ context-specific political embeddedness, we observe distinct social practices in each organisation. The organisation in which OL is most vibrant is the only one in our sample social practices that are directly conducive to OL. These practices comprise unsanctioned negotiations of organisational objectives among staff, as well as a consensus to prioritise evidence and terminate failed projects, despite political pressures to spend more, faster. We conclude that future research on OL needs to eschew references to hypothetical best practices and instead study OL empirically and comparatively by connecting previously disjointed scholarly literatures through theory.

Our research asks how 89 randomly selected development bureaucrats in three OECD member states-Germany, Norway and South Korea-pursue the amorphous concept of development effectiveness. Amid declining adherence to global norms and a booming evidence industry, our analysis demonstrates the analytical value of distinguishing scales and modes of development effectiveness. In each of the resulting four dimensions, bureaucrats' pursuit of development effectiveness is conditioned by two primary considerations: how to satisfy their political principals, and how to sway public opinion. The implications are threefold. First, the four dimensions cannot be integrated into one coherent concept. Second, a scalar shift in political attention towards domestic audiences leads donor bureaucrats to regard global policy processes and macro-level impacts as rhetorical devices rather than as substantive reference points. Third, as a result of this dynamic, the purported embrace of evidence-based policy-making primarily constitutes a risk management approach to safeguard national budget allocations through public legitimation. Overall, our findings therefore caution against optimism about an imminent evidence revolution, as donor bureaucracies have entered yet another era of national interest-driven development politics.

We respond to the lack of measurable conceptualisations of expertise in development agencies by investigating its focus and appreciation in two national aid administrations as a function of knowledge and experience. We apply this definition of expertise to qualitative data from interviews with 58 randomly selected officials at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). We find that both organisations draw on similar sets of knowledge and experience. However, BMZ and Norad staff show different valuations of substantive knowledge as opposed to administrative knowledge and individual experience, each of which is rooted in distinct organisational objectives and norms. At BMZ, substantive knowledge is expendable, but individual experience is considered non-substitutable, and expertise is focused on navigating political priorities. At Norad, substantive knowledge is a prerequisite for career advancement, and experience is seen to ideally leverage such knowledge. Expertise at Norad is thus focused on thematic rather than political priorities. These findings have broader implications for the ability of development agencies to make autonomous policy decisions, for the potential of specialist careers and internal knowledge management to improve organisational effectiveness, and possibly also for the future of these agencies in the face of existential challenges.

Motivation: Individual knowledge and professional learning among donor-agency bureaucrats play a decisive role in the design and implementation of development interventions. Understanding how to provide optimal training curricula for their staff is key for these bureaucracies' effectiveness as central organizational actors in the international development field. Purpose: We analyse individual preferences for professional learning pathways in three bilateral donor-agency bureaucracies-the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)-to understand determinants of decision-making and opportunities for improvement. We ask: how do bureaucrats in these organizations assess different options for knowledge acquisition and learning? Approach and methods: We integrate experimental and qualitative data to provide a comparative perspective on learning practices among donor-agency bureaucrats. Drawing on 89 randomly sampled interviews across three bureaucracies and representing both headquarters and recipient-country staff, we conducted a web-administered choice-based conjoint analysis among 81 bureaucrats to capture interactions between five dimensions of professional learning. We then contextualize our experimental findings through our interview data. Findings: We find that the bureaucrats in our sample have a statistically significant preference for mandatory as opposed to optional training. We note that among the five dimensions of professional learning, the mode of training is the only one that an organization can directly influence. Triangulation with our interview data suggests that this preferred modality of learning is complemented by a staff preference for more targeted substantive training on thematic competencies as opposed to focusing on administrative procedures. Policy implications: Although broad administrative knowledge and experience are indispensable for professionals working at the interface of politics and programming, they are not enough. Donor agencies must take their staff members' learning preferences seriously and not shift the burden of learning about substantive issues onto individual staff.

We analyse qualitative data collected from employees at Germany’s two main international development organisations, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) Development Bank, to study how upward accountability and organisational learning interact in the world’s second largest foreign aid system. Goffman’s ‘staging’ heuristic is applied to unpack social practices in these two organisations. We find that employees navigate two separate domains, a frontstage and a backstage. They consider the federal bureaucracy an audience expecting a coherent storyline despite the messy realities of foreign aid. In response, they engage in impression management on a frontstage while shielding their backstages from scrutiny to maximise autonomy. As a result, organisational learning at GIZ and KfW in Goffman’s terms focuses on collective efficacy at satisfying accountability expectations through staged performances. We relate these insights to the hierarchical structure of Germany’s foreign aid system, the role of organisational interests and prevailing professional norms.

International Development Cooperation Today: A Radical Shift towards a Global Paradigm, Patrick Develtere, Huib Huyse, and Jan Van Ongevalle (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2021), 317 pp., paperback $39.50. - Volume 36 Issue 3

This article presents findings of an analysis of the association between changes in neighborhoods’ racial composition and income inequality in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. We cluster U.S. Census data at the ward and district levels and find that the connection between race and income inequality appears potent in Washington, DC. Racially more homogeneous wards have lower income inequalities than those that are racially heterogeneous. We also show that two alternative measures of neighborhood-level racial diversity—proportion white and an entropy score—account for substantial shares in the variation in household incomes in these wards. In contrast, these patterns in the surrounding counties are less pronounced. Our analysis suggests that the U.S. capital’s growing prosperity and improved fiscal health have intensified income inequality across the DC metropolitan area especially within Washington, DC. We probe into these differences and argue that place stratification theory is helpful to understand changing neighborhood compositions in the entire Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Our results illustrate a need for more effective policy coordination across jurisdictions as well as greater consideration of housing policy to help decrease residential segregation and support vulnerable residents in and around the U.S. capital city.

Competing narratives of globalization constitute parameters that both constrain industrial policymaking and provide opportunities to negotiate alternatives. Such representations of globalization are powerful precisely because they can become objectified as policy. They are also compelling because the literature on industrial policy has so far largely left them out. Focusing on the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), this chapter analyses how elite narratives of globalization expressed in verbal and written texts bear on industrial policies. It documents how the narratives of hyper-globalization and de-globalization have gradually been supplanted by three more specific storylines: (1) globalization as inexorable and malleable; (2) regionalization as a process that can refract global neo-liberalism; and (3) digital industrialization as a promise for industry-driven development yet a catalyst for inequality in low- and middle-income countries. The chapter shows how these storylines form policy openings that can be leveraged to pursue creative, home-grown industrialization strategies.

This chapter assesses transdisciplinarity as an epistemological and methodological approach to research and teaching in the emerging field of global studies. It posits that the world’s most pressing problems in the areas of migration, health, and intersectional identities, to name a few, are unlikely to be addressed convincingly by inquiries rooted exclusively in singular social science disciplines. At the same time, transdisciplinarity is understood as a means to complement disciplinary research, not to dispense with it. By foregrounding global–local dynamics and their effects across scales, global studies can draw from a wealth of approaches and experiences in interdisciplinary scholarship without becoming entangled in protracted epistemological battles over scholarly turf. This chapter then provides examples of transdisciplinary research in global studies and closes by stressing the importance of disciplinary methodological innovations as building blocks for multimodal designs and arguing for methodological rigor in global studies, whether transdisciplinary or not.

A review of the literature on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) published during the past fifteen years demonstrates that accountabilities have constituted one of this global framework’s weaknesses. In response, we develop four dimensions of accountability in global development governance and apply them to the emerging Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the MDGs’ successors. We focus on the extent to which the SDGs change accountabilities of bilateral donors and multilateral aid organizations to national recipient governments and to local beneficiaries. We find that compared to the MDGs, national governments had markedly more influence on the content of the SDGs. At the same time, despite UN-sponsored efforts to seek input from the public, post-2015 agenda-setting in global development governance continues being determined by policy elites. We conclude with a call for strengthening and institutionalizing downstream accountabilities as building blocks for global transparency and international aid effectiveness.

Despite their global popularity and relevance to Communication for Development (C4D), TED talks have not yet been systematically examined from the vantage point of C4D. We offer the first theoretical and empirical investigation of both content and structure of talks on international development by leveraging definitions of C4D as well as literature on mediatization, rituals in international relations, and online activism. Our analysis suggests that TED talks succeed in disseminating ideas and sparking public interest. At the same time, they reflect institutionalized, corporatized modes of mass communication rooted in elitist discourses and practices. Contrary to popular perceptions, we therefore conclude that while TED talks are an effective vehicle for information dissemination, they are an unlikely catalyst for social change.

We review the ontological and pedagogical origins of International Development graduate education in the context of increasing pressures to 'professionalise' graduate curricula. We apply Giroux's concept of 'vocationalisation' to argue that professionalisation risks undermining the field's intellectual foundations in an elusive quest to equip students with functional rather than intellectual skills. Acknowledging ever-growing competition among graduates for gainful employment in this sector, we argue that instructors of International Development should recommit to the field's reflective tradition by creating spaces for transformative education and develop a repoliticised ethos that critically engages global capitalism.

This paper offers insights into dynamics of urban violence in two Central American countries that have evolved very differently historically. Costa Rica boasts the lowest overall levels of poverty and inequality of any country on the Isthmus, and has benefited from decades of stable and relatively inclusive governance highlighted by ambitious social policies. El Salvador, by contrast, exhibits severe levels of poverty and inequality typical of its neighbors, as well as a long history of exclusionary rule and corresponding inattention to social welfare. Yet our research reveals significant parallels between the two countries. This three-year, multi-method comparative study, carried out by teams at FLACSO-Costa Rica and FLACSO-El Salvador in collaboration with American University and with support from the IDRC/DFID Safe and Inclusive Cities program, focused on violence in two impoverished urban communities in Costa Rica and three in El Salvador. In all five settings, we analyzed neighborhood dynamics as well as community assessments of anti-violence interventions.We identified numerous lessons, some of which are counterintuitive, as well as concrete measures for consideration by regional, national, and local policymakers and community actors.

Blogs plus Twitter = Change? Discursive reproduction of global governance and the limits of social media

Noting limited attention by international development agencies to inequalities compared to global poverty, we ask how these two challenges have been framed in agencies' policy publications during the past several decades. Following a recent application of algorithmic analysis to health policy narratives in the UK, we use text-mining software to compare the frequency of two alternative conceptualisations of poverty and inequality in three different document categories: the World Bank's World Development Reports, the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Reports and a set of white papers by bilateral donor agencies. In a second step, we visualise each document's degree of contextual similarity in using the two conceptualisations of poverty and inequality with all documents in the same source category. We find that while references to poverty have, on average, been twice as prominent as references to inequality, conceptualisations of poverty and inequality as well as the textual contexts in which they appear differ both temporally and substantively between agencies included in our sample. We show how such agency-specific framing patterns can be leveraged politically to forge more effective social policy coalitions. We also outline follow-up research capable of capturing the politics of language underpinning our observations.

Despite their global popularity and relevance to Communication for Development (C4D), TED talks have not yet been systematically examined from the vantage point of C4D. We offer the first theoretical and empirical investigation of both the content and structure of talks on international development by leveraging definitions of C4D as well as literature on mediatization, rituals in international relations, and online activism. Our analysis suggests that TED talks succeed in disseminating ideas and sparking public interest. At the same time, they reflect institutionalized, corporatized modes of mass communication rooted in elitist discourses and practices. Contrary to popular perceptions, we therefore conclude that while TED talks are an effective vehicle for information dissemination, they are an unlikely catalyst for social change.

This article juxtaposes two distinct violent dynamics in a highly securitized urban space: one covered by global media in every detail, yet of marginal importance to the vast majority of city dwellers; the other endemic, but absent from outsiders' urban imaginary of life and death in Kabul. Although insurgent forces have utilized Afghanistan's capital city as a stage for acts of spectacular violence ever since the 2001 international invasion, for most city dwellers, especially women and children, domestic abuse has constituted the main threat to physical well-being. In contrast, increases in mortality and morbidity due to insurgent attacks carried out in the city between 2002 and 2011 have been infinitesimal. An interpretive framework that draws from critical geographical scholarship by highlighting global discourses and local norms helps expose that the international community's discursive construction of Kabul as the locus for post-2001 neoliberal state-building lies at the heart of persistent, yet largely invisible, victimization within the city. The analysis demonstrates how such scalar politics of security have turned Kabul into an urban stage that provides global visibility of spectacular violence against foreigners while eclipsing endemic causes of bodily harm among Afghans.