This blog post has been adapted from an article in Journal of Social Science & Medicine – Population Health. If you’ve worked in development for long enough, at some point you’ve scratched your head about why a technically sound strategy achieved less than expected results. As the old business adage goes, “Culture eats strategy for…
“Failure is strength. The most effective and innovative organizations are those that are willing to speak openly about their failures because the only truly ‘bad’ failure is one that’s repeated.” —Engineers without Borders, USAID Learning Lab No one wants to fail. And fewer wish to own up to it. Understanding the causes of failure is…
Understanding cultural norms is essential to achieving results in development interventions and preventing interventions from causing unintended negative consequences. However, capturing norms within everyday contexts in ways that can be monitored and evaluated can be expensive and time consuming and is not always feasible. We tested a novel method, the cultural consensus analysis (CCA), in…
This post originally appeared on Mongabay. Photo courtesy of Samantha Cheng. The imperative for nature conservation has never been greater. A widely publicized intergovernmental report predicts extinction for more than a million species over the next few decades unless we drastically change human consumption and economic growth. This loss of species will threaten the global…
This chapter was written by Chemonics employees Enrique Betancourt and Todd Diamond as part of an anthology published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) entitled “Sharpening Our Efforts: The Role of International Development in Countering Violent Extremism.” It proposes five principles aimed at countering and preventing violent extremism: adapting to the unstable…
For decades, the international development community has struggled to prove its effectiveness by ensuring that programs deliver politically viable solutions that respond to locally led processes. Guaranteeing these principles is a shared responsibility between donors and implementers. While donors need to shed the straitjackets of untested theories of change, pre-established project activities, and onerous reporting…
This paper was the result of Chemonics’ collaboration with the Conservation Solutions Lab (CSL) at Arizona State University to ask a very basic and important question: Do we have any evidence to show that this approach is achieving the results we seek? At the request of Chemonics and CSL, the authors traveled to three East…
This review was undertaken as part of a joint initiative, the Conservation Solutions Lab, between Arizona State University and Chemonics, and seeks to build knowledge and evidence-based approaches for more effective community engagement in conservation. The analysis revealed that the current evidence base is lacking the robust data needed to uncover the links between governance…
What do forest and species loss have to do with politics? A great deal, in fact. Conserving and protecting natural resources involves a complex set of power dynamics, interests, and economies — licit and illicit — that affect how a program can operate within an existing local system. Biodiversity programming must embrace a Thinking and…
Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) is all the buzz these days, with political economy analysis (PEA) being included in tenders, and project designs across sectors. But what does TWP-PEA look like beyond design, as an integral part of implementation? During program design and even start-up, PEAs can provide recommendations while acknowledging context complexities, actors and…
From March 6 to 8, the Chamber of Digital Commerce and Georgetown University’s Center for Financial Markets and Policy will host the third annual D.C. Blockchain Summit, which Chemonics is proud to sponsor. The summit will bring together a diverse audience from the private sector, government, and media to discuss applications for blockchain and cryptocurrencies.…