These changes include shifts in the distribution of poverty and global growth, the emergence of new donors, the growing recognition of the role of the private sector in promoting development, and new global challenges such as climate change. At the same time, donor countries must justify the aid they provide by proving its impact to voters who face austerity at home.

ODI supports the development of new, more effective models to finance development and humanitarian action, and to engage public, private and civil society actors. Our work recognises that context matters for lasting impact, and understanding context is essential for effective action.

Our work

The Budget Strengthening Initiative is piloting news ways of putting technical assistance at the heart of key policy processes in fragile states. Evidence so far suggests that an arms-length relationship with the supporting donor enables a more effective engagement than might otherwise be the case.

The Business and Development Exchange programme, funded by AusAID, will bring together researchers, donors and the private sector to conduct independent research into the efficacy of different interventions. The aim is to provide new thinking and more robust evidence about the role of business in development.

Conventional approaches to assessing impact suffer from some familiar constraints – they tend to be complicated, expensive, take a long time to deliver results, and may fall short of providing genuine practical guidance on how policies and programmes can work well in the real world.  The Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme is leading the Methods Lab a new work programme also supported by AusAID which aims to provide innovative, relevant and timely tools for assessing the impact of programmes and policies.

The Horizon 2025 paper has provided an innovative framework for donor agencies to help them think about the evolving context for their work, and suggest parameters for deciding about their future.

ODI has provided practical models for applying expertise in understanding the political economy and institutional features of public goods and services provision. Our Politics and Governance (POGO) and Water Policy programmes, for example, have examined what works for and against the delivery of water and sanitation in Viet Nam and Sierra Leone. POGO has also worked with Plan UK to assess the impact of community ‘scorecards’ in Malawi to fill a knowledge gap on how social accountability initiatives work in practice. And our Social Development programme has tested ways to align social and gender audit methodologies with national development plans, working with the government of Viet Nam to promote the inclusion of marginalised populations. POGO has encouraged donors to focus on human rights and engagement with political parties, working, for example, with the World Bank to show how development work in fragile states can be viewed through a human-rights lens.

Our Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) contributes to growing consensus on what works in civil-military coordination. HPG has built partnerships with a range of military, peacekeeping and security organisations and humanitarian agencies to find common ground on humanitarian action.  A review of country-specific Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) guidelines on civil-military coordination by HPG now informs IASC policy discussions on this issue, and the International Committee of the Red Cross has asked HPG to draft new standards for coordination between military and security actors. During its next phase of work HPG plans to explore and identify the potential for new technologies (particularly mobile telecommunications) in changing the context for humanitarian action.