There’s been a lot of interest in the imminent vacancy of World Bank President, with numerous suggestions of qualified individuals who should be on the list. This post looks at one particular aspect of the role which seems to be missing from most of this debate, and which should be high on the list of criteria [...]
Archive for the ‘Public Policy’ Category
Official Views, Doing the Wrong Thing ‘Righter’, and the World Bank Presidency
Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Influence, Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Strategy on March 5, 2012 | 12 Comments »
State fragility as a wicked problem?
Posted in Conflict and peace building, Evaluation, Evolution, Leadership, Meetings, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on February 15, 2012 | 7 Comments »
Fragile states are growing in importance on the development and humanitarian agenda. One of the most concrete outcomes of last years aid summit in Busan was the New Deal for fragile states. Most major donors are looking to increase their presence and effort in fragile states, and implementing agencies are having to work out what [...]
South Africa’s democracy: Complexity theory in action
Posted in Accountability, Economics, Evolution, Innovation, Institutions, Leadership, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on December 16, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Dr Brian Levy is a Public Sector Governance Advisor at the World Bank, andused to head up the unit responsible implementing the Bank’s governance and anti-corruption strategy. In this guest post, cross-posted from here, he explores the relevance of complexity theory insights for South Africa. A fascinating read. The edge of chaos is the balance [...]
Climate change adaptation, resilience and complexity
Posted in Climate change, Innovation, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on December 1, 2011 | 2 Comments »
With the latest round of UN climate talks underway in Durban this week, many are rightly concerned about the agreements that will be reached (if any), and whether it will be a case of too little, too late (quite probably). The challenges of achieving global public policy consensus aside, new research is highlighting a range [...]
New Scientist Briefing: Can ecosystems show how to fix the euro?
Posted in Biology, Economics, Financial crisis, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Networks, Public Policy, Technology, Trade on November 10, 2011 | 5 Comments »
The eurozone, like the rest of the world economy, is a complex networked system. That gives it properties economists rarely consider but which could help us understand the current crisis. This New Scientist ‘Science in Society’ Briefing examines the issues. What is a complex network? Complex networks have many interconnected components which influence each other’s [...]
What Does The Atlas of Economic Complexity Mean for Development?
Posted in Climate change, Economics, Evolution, Financial crisis, Innovation, Networks, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Technology, Trade on November 3, 2011 | 9 Comments »
Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Cesar Hidalgo of MIT (whose work I have blogged about previously here) have just published the deeply impressive Atlas of Economic Complexity. It is built around an innovative, network-based methodology for understanding economies and their potential for growth. It represents perhaps the most systematic and in-depth application of the ideas [...]
Global Resilience Requires Novelty – A Speech by Buzz Holling
Posted in Meetings, Public Policy, Resilience on October 25, 2011 | 4 Comments »
One of the areas where complexity thinking has entered the mainstream of development policy and practice is in resilience thinking. Much of this work owes a debt to C.S. ‘Buzz’ Holling, whose work on resilience of ecologies in the 1970s provided the intellectual underpinning to much recent work. Holling was recently awarded an honorary doctorate [...]
Complexity and Growing Up
Posted in Evolution, Leadership, Public Policy, Strategy on October 20, 2011 | 8 Comments »
Ted Cadsby, MBA, CFA, is a corporate director, principal of TRC Consulting, former executive vice-president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and author of two books on investing. This was cross-posted from Huffington. If history teaches us anything, it’s that history teaches us nothing. A decade after the “mission accomplished” banner debacle, many voters [...]
USAID’s Complexity Journey
Posted in Conflict and peace building, Evaluation, Innovation, Leadership, Meetings, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on October 17, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Last week saw a remarkable meeting in Washington, bringing together USAID staff with scientists and practitioners working on complex systems. This post reflects on the event and outlines some of the emerging lessons. Background There have been a number of meetings on the topic of complexity and development in different locations around the world in [...]
The Complexity of Scaling Up
Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Evolution, Healthcare, Innovation, Leadership, Malaria, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Strategy on October 3, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Despite increased prominence and funding of global health initiatives, attempts to scale up health services in developing countries are failing, with serious implications for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. A new paper argues that a key first step is to get a more realistic understanding of health systems, using the lens of complex adaptive systems. [...]
