Adaptive Development

The Asia Foundation and the Australian Embassy in the Philippines today released a new publication, Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines. Written by London School of Economics and Political Science Professor John T. Sidel and The Asia Foundation’s Jaime Faustino, the book examines the first phase… Read more

Since early 2012, The Asia Foundation’s Coalitions for Change project in the Philippines has been rocking the emerging discipline of “thinking and working politically,” which is…what, exactly? In a new book, Jaime Faustino answers that question with a tale of strange bedfellows, unexpected obstacles, and astonishing solutions.

Oxfam blog From Poverty to Power features program director Jaime Faustino in an audio interview with Oxfam’s Duncan Green on the Foundation’s Coalitions for Change (CfC) program. The interview was followed by an article comparing CfC with other adaptive management programs in Tanzania, Nigeria, and Myanmar. 

The Asia Foundation’s Philippines office, with the support from the Australian Embassy, recently hosted a two-day Practitioners Forum on Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) in adaptive programming. The forum served as a platform for exchange, collaboration, and network-building to more than 50 MEL specialists from around the world. This repo… Read more

Now in its 5th year, the Australasian Aid Conference held at the Australian National University in Canberra on February 12-14, was more robust and urgent than ever. With record attendance, 34 parallel sessions, three plenaries, and a keynote address, the AAC, organized by the Development Policy Centre in partnership with The Asia Foundation, has ev… Read more

On October 2, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte signed a law postponing barangay (village) and Sangguniang Kabataan (youth) elections to May 2018—less than one month before they were scheduled to take place on October 23. The move marks the second postponement of local elections under Duterte, who claimed that the elections could interfere with… Read more

Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, kicked off this year’s Australasian Aid Conference on February 15 and 16 with a reminder of the pressures facing international development today, and that “like other strands of globalization, our international aid sector must step up and explain—and re-explain, in clear and effective terms, why it is in… Read more

This paper explores why community policing has become a popular area of programming, and the opportunities it offers for institutional reform. In post-conflict, post-authoritarian, and high crime environments, community policing is seen as a way to provide the security needed for sustainable development. Yet community policing is also an ambiguous… Read more

This paper analyzes how community dispute resolution interventions offer a promising alternative to typical donor statebuilding and peacebuilding interventions. Resolving local disputes in this manner is generally more accessible, legitimate, and cheaper than formal courts in many developing and conflict-affected countries. The paper provides a bir… Read more

This paper tracks the efforts of an Asia Foundation team and local stakeholders as they worked to support improvements in the solid waste management sector in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The team worked in a flexible way with a range of partners, and with particular focus on understanding the incentives and politics affecting service delivery. While refo… Read more

This paper examines the Asia Foundation’s efforts to support change in Bangladesh’s leather sector. Working closely with local partners, the Asia Foundation team has specifically supported efforts to move tanneries out of a dangerously polluted location to a modern industrial park that will improve compliance with health and environmental protectio… Read more

This paper is the sixth in the Asia Foundation’s Working Politically in Practice Series funded through a partnership with the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. While past cases have studied lessons from particular programs, tools used to aid practitioners, and reflections from those in the field, this paper looks across… Read more

This paper reviews the experience of the Asia Foundation in implementing iterative, searching approaches to development programming. Drawing on several case studies, most notably those funded through the unique partnership between the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Asia Foundation, this paper adds to th… Read more

In recent years there have been growing calls for new approaches to supporting peace in post-conflict contexts, as current peacebuilding models do not accurately reflect what we know about the nature of conflict, how it ends, and how peace processes are sustained and peace consolidated. To address these issues, The Asia Foundation launched Beyond t… Read more