Saudi Arabia and climate action: Opportunities for think tanks
Saudi Arabia is taking steps to scale up its climate action, presenting a window of opportunity for Saudi think tanks to inform and influence climate policy with research...
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Managing change and uncertainty within a Serbian think tank
After two years as director of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP), I have written this piece about the process BCSP went through to consolidate itself as an...
How are funders supporting development organisations to be more effective?
In my last post, I described what an organisation is and how it might be made more effective, drawing on three schools of thought. In this post, I describe what funders...
How and how well do organisations learn?
There’s a lot of emphasis on being a learning organisation nowadays. But how and how well do organisations learn in practice? Based on my experience of consulting to funding organisations...
What makes a policy work and how can think tanks support this?
This is an important question given that policymaking is a critical activity of governments and impacts the lives of all people across the globe. Think tanks play an...
On think tanks in Iraq: Is it viable for think tanks to reform and operate in an unstable environment?
My first meeting with a number of leaders, pioneers, and experts of Iraqi think tanks, within the DEVE M.E. Think Tanks Initiative, was highly successful and allowed me...
Governance and service delivery in sub-Saharan Africa: Eight reflections from a recent landscape scan
Several actors within the global development sector have assumed that better governed states would lead to improved service delivery and better social development...
Six takeaways from six years as Director of Communications at On Think Tanks
I have been part of small and large organisations, each with their own complexities, challenges and advantages. By 2016, I thought I’d done the communications rounds:...
Authorship assignment: Recognising the contributions of individual authors of multi-authored reports
Step-by-step over the past 50 years the production of social science research, including policy research, has shifted from a solitary enterprise to a team effort. The...
Chukwuka Onyekwena, executive director at the Centre for the Study of Economies of Africa (video)
Chukwuka Onyekwena talked to Enrique Mendizabal about the policy space in Nigeria and the context in which think tanks operate, how the Covid-19 crisis has impacted the demand for research...
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s organisational effectiveness …
US foundations give away billions of dollars a year to improve human development around the world. Most of the money goes to organisations, which in turn make efforts to...
Three lessons on evaluation: why thinking about usefulness, communication and learning matters
The article by Ajoy Datta from OTT covering lessons on devising, revising and evaluating strategies for funding organisations inspired me to pull together three critical...