title: What have we learned about learning? Unpacking the relationship between knowledge and organisational change in development agencies
Creators: name: Yanguas, Pablo
Publisher: name: German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/01t3zke88
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: learning
subject: adaptation
subject: knowledge
subject: M&amp;E
subject: monitoring
subject: evaluation
subject: research
subject: organisational change

description: Development cooperation has spent decades wrangling over the merits, evidence, and
 implications of what we may term “the learning hypothesis”: the idea that increased
 knowledge by development organisations must logically lead to increased effectiveness in
 the performance of their development activities. Organisations of all stripes have built
 research and monitoring and evaluation (M&amp;E) departments, adopted a multitude of
 knowledge management systems and tools, and tinkered with different ways to structure
 their organograms to stimulate knowledge sharing and learning. The topic of organisational
 learning is particularly significant as the global development community grapples with
 increasingly complex problems and the aspiration of evidence-based policymaking. This
 paper presents an analytical framework for interrogating “the learning hypothesis”,
 breaking it down into causal steps: knowledge causes learning, learning causes
 organisational change, change causes effectiveness. The framework focuses on the first two
 sub-hypotheses, mapping out the conceptual space around them by outlining potential
 relationships between different types of knowledge – tacit and explicit, internal and
 external – and between different types of learning – operational and strategic. This map
 provides a foundation for three key research questions: What impact has the rising
 knowledge agenda had on development organisations? Which factors appear to enable or
 inhibit organisational learning? What is the relationship between operational and
 strategic learning and organisational change? A review of available evaluations and
 studies, including two cases from former UK Department for International Development
 (DFID) and the World Bank, reveals that there is insufficient evidence to support the
 causal claim that knowledge leads to learning and thereby to organisational change in
 development agencies. Sources point to tacit learning prevailing while explicit knowledge
 management systems flounder, and external advocacy agendas appear more compelling than
 internal research and evaluation products. It is not entirely clear how, or indeed,
 whether operational and strategic learning intersect, with delivery-level lessons hardly
 aggregating into structural or policy shifts. Organisational change – even that aimed at
 enhancing learning – is rarely based on lessons learned from practice. More research is
 necessary to fully unpack the learning hypothesis, but what limited evidence is available
 disproves rather than confirms its central claim. This has significant implications for
 the future of learning in development agencies as advocated by thought leaders,
 researchers, and reformers. In particular, the latter should consider an evidence-based
 reassessment of the function and value-for-money of research and M&amp;E in
 development practice, and a more critical examination of the politics of external advocacy
 efforts around innovative aid approaches like thinking and working politically, adaptive
 management, or results-based management.
description: Discussion Paper, 9/2021