Learning and evaluation

Superforecasters exist: they are people who are ready to challenge their own ideas

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The illusion of controlling the future has always been with us designing and implementing development projects and programmes. Tool after tool we have had an uncomfortable relationship with the idea that development is very messy, risky, prone to failure as well as success. Forecast and planning are key activities in our work: theories of change, logframes, the old zopp, outputs, outcomes, goal. All this to maintain some control […]

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Media and politics: what is the space for research evidence?

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  Lately I have been thinking that when one works, like I do, in the area of policy processes and how they can be better informed by knowledge and research evidence it is easy to think that the demand for evidence comes mainly (or only) from one side: government institutions. Government institutions at national and

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Community knowledge + mobile phones = evidence for policy response

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This morning I jumped on the TransJakarta bus N 1 and travelled to Central Jakarta to the modern and cozy office of PulseLab. JonneCatshoek of Elva.org was presenting about digital citizen engagement strategies for making programmes more effective and accountable. Jonne has been working for the last few years in Georgia and his presentation was about his

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What are we talking when we talk about the demand and use of research evidence? Some thoughts after a trip to the city of Probolinggo in East Java.

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I travelled a couple of weeks ago with colleagues from the Knowledge Sector Initiative (KSI) to the city of Probolinggo, in the eastern part of Java. To get there you have to fly from Jakarta to  Malang (ca. 1 hour and 15 minutes) and then drive for about two hours.  It is a nice car ride. There is traffic on the road

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On the shore of a Finnish lake and the gap between researchers and policy makers

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Finland is a country of lakes. There are 187,888 of them but the exhibition (On the Shore of the Lake Tuusula Artist Community) I visited with my daughter during the holidays at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki was about one of them: Lake Tuusula. Why Lake Tuusula? Because at Lake Tuusula, which is 40km

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‘If not us, then who?’ Climate change and the devastation left by typhoons Haiyan in the Philippines

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Typhoon Hayian was the 25th typhoon that hit the Philippines this year. I lived in the city of Dumaguete in the Philippines for four years and left last May. My family is still there and we were talking on Skype about the typhoon that was approaching the Filipino coast. Dumaguete lies just a couple of

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