Systems and change

Measuring Impact for Development Mutants, An Ongoing Conversation

The original version of this article can be found here on the Pulse Lab Jakarta Medium account. A Google search for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” will produce millions of results in a speed that seems like the blink of an eye. These results include books, articles, academic papers, information about conferences and workshops… the works. As […]

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The transformation of governance and policy systems in the digital age

I went for a run yesterday evening and listened to one episode of the World Economic Forum Series podcats series on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This episode (abstract and link to ScoundCloud below) focused on changes that may occur in the governance systems and to some extent the democratic principles that underpin them. These changes

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The evidence on Climate Change is overwhelming, but ….

UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published its latest report. The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures

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Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash

What is policy impact? Well, it depends from what we mean by policy change

During the last few weeks I have been working on the  design of an adaptive monitoring and learning framework to assess contribution to policy change on climate adaptation in few countries.  Working on the framework made me re-read some articles and papers about policy change which I had read some years ago. Below the key

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A conversation about policy experiments

The search for ways to design policies that help to solve societal problems is continuously evolving. The traditional evidence-based approach to policy making involves generating research results and using these to inform policy decisions. This blog post is based on an interview with Mikko Annala, Head of Governance Innovation at Demos Helsinki. It was originally posted on

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Looking at evidence-informed policymaking through the \’dissonance\’ lens

Last week I attended  the Development Days Conference 2018 in Helsinki. This is a yearly event organised by the Finnish Society for Development Research. This year\’s topic was: The Politics of Sustainability: Re-thinking resources, values and justice. It is a nice and informal event which brings together researchers, activists, and practitioners from all over Finland

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