Adaptive management is critical for implementing international development programmes in complex, unpredictable environments. This paper was motivated by the apparent disconnect between the structures and processes that shape procurement and the trend toward more adaptive models of programming in development organisations. Its primary target audience is donor organisations, and it will focus on the responsibility of the donor as an enabler of adaptation. It first presents a definition of adaptive management, and then describes how procurement has evolved to enable more adaptive management. It concludes with a discussion of the untapped potential for adaptive management to shape donor-partner relationships.

Successful NGO development and academic partnerships have, at their core, effective intercultural and multilingual communication and translation practices and processes, including critical recognition of the role of “fixers”, who act as the “interface” between local participants and academic NGO impact-assessment researchers. Examining what we call the “contrôleuse” in development research projects in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, we show the need, as in journalism, to critically interrogate this intermediary role. Identifying and incorporating the role into research funding and design can be a simple and practical contribution towards challenging inequalities, including contrôleuse perspectives and increasing participatory impact-assessment and development practices.

This paper evaluates the impacts of a Brazilian home-based programme on violent behaviour of elementary school students. To identify the causal impact, it explores the variation between schools with potentially treated students and the municipalities that implemented the programme over the years. The results suggest a reduction in verbal or physical abuse, theft or robbery, and attack or threat by more than 5 percentage points in schools with treated students. There is also evidence that the effects are greater the sooner children participate in the programme, meaning that early years interventions can be an effective policy to reduce school violence.

Climate compatible development (CCD) is a deliberate policy framework that reduces climate-related harm while increasing development opportunities when its three components – adaptation, mitigation, and development – are pursued jointly. In this viewpoint article, we use three island case studies – urban infrastructure improvements in the Solomon Islands, clean energy transitions in Hawaii, and sustainable tourism in the Seychelles – to argue that, in practice, CCD is not always deliberate and that a focus on one component can have unintended but positive outcomes for the others. These case studies illustrate the potential for “triple wins”, including lower emissions, increased resilience, and accelerated development.

This article presents a case study on how dairy producers and a university are connected to generate territorial development in a municipality. The field of study along with in-depth semi-structured interviews showed that university knowledge reaches dairy farmers through weak ties and imitating production processes. This relationship makes it possible to show that the knowledge produced in academia reaches producers, even though there is no deliberate plan to bring these two local development actors together. This case study allows us to better understand local actors and the manner in which they can generate development in an area.

School safety within and outside the schools is a priority for school heads, teacher education administrators and the governments around the globe. In China, despite several policy instruments, rules and regulations, school safety is often questioned and highlighted in the print and TV media. There is a need to address the issues associated with school safety and provide improved educational environments for male and female students in rural and urban areas. This paper uses 12 indicators to assess the safety status in schools in a remote province of Gansu, China and provide a comparative perspective between urban and rural schools and along gender lines.

There is an increasing involvement of a number of non-state actors such as NGOs and community based organisations (CBOs) in poverty alleviation programmes. This calls for greater coordination among the actors for the effective implementation of such programmes. This article explores the various factors influencing coordination in multi-actor policy implementation, using a case study of a rural livelihoods enhancement programme implemented in the state of Odisha in India. The findings suggest that programme design, frequency of interaction, interdependency among actors, credibility of NGOs, leadership and personal traits have helped in coordination among state, NGOs and CBOs.

The study aims to inspect the child immunisation status of Barak Valley, Assam. Simultaneously, the study scrutinises the efficacy of the mother’s health status along with other social, economic and demographic factors on universalising child’s immunisation in the study area holistically. The study is based on a novel data set especially collected for this study. The study exercises the Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Logit model for investigating the objectives. It concludes that other than the mother’s health status, mother’s education, religion, the sex of the child, etc., are important decisive components of child immunisation in the study area.