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Book

Development and the Learning Organisation

Essays from Development in Practice

Laura Roper, Jethro Pettit, Deborah Eade

Series: Development in Practice Reader

Published: 2003
Pages: 452

Paperback: 9780855984700

As development NGOs and official aid agencies embrace the idea of "becoming a learning organisation", they are increasingly concerned with some form of knowledge generation and organizational learning. To date, the literature on these issues tended to come out of the private sector and reflect a Western worldview. This book presents contributions from development scholars and practitioners from a range of institutional backgrounds around the world, some introducing new approaches and models, others offering critical case studies of individual and group learning practice across cultures, and organizational efforts to put theory into practice. Among the lessons to emerge from this work are that learning is hard to do, that we often learn the wrong things and that huge gaps often remain between our learning and our behaviour or practice. There are clearly no simple recipes for success, but when learning breakthroughs do occur, the organizational whole can truly become more than the sum of its parts.
Contributors
Preface
Development and the Learning Organisation: an introduction 1
Operationalising bottom-up learning in international NGOs: barriers and alternatives 22
Should development agencies have Official Views? 40
Engendering organisational practice in NGOs: the case of Utthan 58
Organisational learning: a borrowed toolbox? 76
Making the organisation learn: demystification and management action 89
Achieving successful academic-practitioner research collaborations 110
Knowledge to action: evaluation for learning in a multi-organisational global partnership 121
Guest learning and adaptation in the field: a Navajo case study 132
Can bilateral programmes become learning organisations? Experiences from institutionalising participation in Keiyo Marakwet in Kenya 152
A chocolate-coated case for alternative international business models 169
Learning leaders: the key to learning organisations 190
Leading learning and change from the middle: reconceptualising strategy's purpose, content, and measures 205
The struggle for organisational change - how the Action Aid Accountability, Learning and Planning System emerged 225
Heifer International: growing a learning organisation 242
'New learning in old organisations': children's participation in a school-based nutrition project in western Kenya 261
Organisational learning in NGOs: an example of an intervention based on the work of Chris Argyris 277
Mainstreaming disaster mitigation: challenges to organisational learning in NGOs 294
The learning process of the Local Capacities for Peace Project 303
Humanitarian principles and organisational culture: everyday practice in Medecins Sans Frontieres-Holland 316
Perceptions and practices of monitoring and evaluation: international NGO experiences in Ethiopia 332
Learning from complexity: the International Development Research Centre's experience with Outcome Mapping 356
Modelling learning programmes 366
Learning for change: the art of assessing the impact of advocacy work 373
Resources 388
Index 412

Laura Roper

Jethro Pettit
Jethro Pettit is a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. He has worked with international NGOs, including World Neighbors and Oxfam America.

Deborah Eade
Deborah Eade was Editor-in-Chief of Development in Practice from 1991 to 2010, prior to which she worked for 10 years in Latin America. She is now an independent writer on development and humanitarian issues, based near Geneva.

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