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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Public Policy’ Category
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 »
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 | 7 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. [...]
Results 2.0: Towards a portfolio-based approach
Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Healthcare, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Malaria, Meetings, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on June 30, 2011 | 7 Comments »
The international development sector has been in a tug of war around the ‘results agenda’ for the past few months. This post explores the tensions and suggests a way to bring the sides together by focusing on the relevance and appropriateness of different approaches.* I: The Results Tug of War Development results is one of many [...]
Success, failure and what lies between
Posted in Accountability, Economics, Evolution, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Meetings, Public Policy, Strategy on June 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Earlier this week Tim Harford, also known as the Undercover Economist, gave a fantastic talk at ODI on the topic of ‘Development as Trial and Error’. Drawing on his latest book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim provided the audience with a compelling account of the need for a different way of thinking [...]
