Lisa Denney, Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute, goes in search of an elusive development beast. Much has been written recently on the need for more flexible and adaptive development programming. This area has spawned considerable research attention across sectors, multiple workshops and communities of practice – but such ways of working in practice remain a little like the

Got back from holiday last week and went straight into a discussion with NGOs and thinktanks on ‘adaptive development’. Really interesting for several reasons: I realized there’s a bunch of civil society people (100 people at the seminar, plus 50 online) thinking along parallel lines to donors and academics in the Thinking and Working Politically and Doing Development Differently initiatives, but