Description
Over the past seventy years, international development and humanitarian aid have saved hundreds of millions of lives, lifted a billion people out of poverty, and improved the quality of life and prospects for half of the world’s population. These advances, framed within a mechanistic and linear paradigm, are now delivering diminishing returns as global social, economic, environmental, technological, and political systems become massively more interdependent.
Though well established in the physical sciences, Complex System Theory is comparatively new to international development, yet it has the potential to provide funders, implementors, and local partners with an additional lens through which to understand Wicked Problems such as climate change, sustainable resource management, or public health resilience.
Working with four to eight of the world's leading international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) across different sectors and countries, this research seeks to determine if training in ‘complexity’ and the provision of non-linear tools and methods to apply to multivariate development programmes quantifiably increase progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and their targets.
