So often, we hear about the need for collaboration to address complex problems — problems like poverty, climate change, gender inequality, systemic racism, and the legacies of colonisation. Some would describe these as wicked problems- resistant to single and simple solutions delivered by actors working alone. Now imagine trying to…

The Try, Test and Learn Fund established by the Federal Government’s Department of Social Services has been a unique investment into supporting vulnerable people towards stable, sustainable independence. The Fund was established to generate new insights and empirical evidence into what works to reduce long-term welfare dependence. Researchers and practitioners…

“We do not think and talk about what we can see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.”– Edgar Schein. Tracking milestones, setting targets and reaching KPIs have become so commonplace within work settings, that their meaning has begun to jumble. What began as a tool…

The words ‘data collection’ likely conjure up a whole range of images and ideas. For me, I think of camping out in a national park, armed with a clip board, Dictaphone, and binoculars — stealthily watching for some rare breed of animal to make an appearance- and then recording said…

We use indicators for all sorts of things: is there enough petrol in the car (check the gauge); is the bath water too hot (stick your finger in it); am I a chance for that next promotion at work (does my boss think I’m any good). The same is true…

Bringing together stakeholders, with a range of resources, skills and ambitions, is a core function of many platforms and partnerships. After all, it is this combining of diverse perspectives that is thought to provide the necessary conditions for fostering innovative solutions to complex problems. Yet it’s not too difficult to…

Much interest is being given to multi-stakeholder partnerships and platforms (or MSPs as they are often called), as solutions to tackling some of the world’s most complex problems. Majority of focus is on the doing of MSPs: how to build and broker them, how to launch them, how to fund…

This year, we set ourselves the task of writing down some of the things we’ve learned about evaluating multi-stakeholder platforms and partnerships. Once we started, we found it difficult to stop. There was all we’ve seen and observed about why people are interested in learning and evaluation in the first…

The SDGs are radical. They emerged as a sort of ‘to-do-list’ full of priorities for taking on the world’s problems. In response to the motherhood statements and unfulfilled promises of the Millennium Development Goals, they were ushered in through a human rights-based approach to relaying the power that a commitment…