Identifying the meso organisations that strengthen technological capability During the past year, Mesopartner has been working with the Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS) and the Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) in South Africa to develop a strategy to identify and respond to discontinuous technological change (see Article 11 in this Annual Reflection, Responding to…
Responding to technological change by promoting learning and skills upgrading in the economy In Article 9 of this Annual Reflection, Strengthening technological capability, two important sub-systems at the meso level are mentioned. The two sub-systems are made up of the technological institutions that disseminate codified and tacit knowledge (through technological services) and the education…
SDGs: Requirements for a more innovative and interdisciplinary promotion approach at the local level In 2016, all 193 UN member states signed the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also named “Transformation Agenda 2030”. In contrast to its forerunner, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs not only focus on providing targets for developing countries but also for industrialised…
Targeting resilience, not growth Many international donor programmes have growth and employment as their prime objectives and performance targets. Impact-level indicators usually cover the number of full-time equivalent jobs created and net-attributable income change. As these programmes are about reducing poverty and inequality, this is certainly right. Or is it?
Adaptive management Adaptive management has caused quite a buzz in development. At the same time, many practitioners, particularly those who have been around for a while, see it more as common sense than as something completely new. Mesopartner has always promoted an approach that is sensitive to the context and to stakeholder capabilities, and is able to incorporate learning over time, adapting…
LED and MSD: Differences and complementarities In recent editions of the Annual Reflection, particularly in the 2015 Annual Reflection, we discussed Local Economic Development (LED) intensively. We have also occasionally discussed Market System Development (MSD).
Twenty years of PACA – Retrospective reflections and opportunities for renewal Twenty years ago, Dr Jörg Meyer-Stamer started writing the zero-draft manual of the rapid participatory approach under the title of Participatory Appraisal of Competitive Advantage (PACA) at an airport in southern Brazil. Some days earlier, he had designed and facilitated the first application of the method in the…
The beauty of circular value chains Both the value chain and the circular economy concept have their unique attractiveness. In the 2016 Annual Reflection we published the article From value chains to circular economic systems (Cunningham, Jenal & Harmes-Liedtke, 2016), where we argue that value chains often optimise efficiency at the product level but fail to provide resource efficiency at an…
Responding to the geography of discontent Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Professor of Regional Planning at the London School of Economics (LSE), has recently contributed to the public debate on the connection between populism and regions (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). His studies show a strong correlation between electoral behaviour and the economic development of territories in Europe. According to his…
A process of search and discovery One output of Mesopartner’s work in bringing theory and practice around complexity and development together is the Systemic Insight process logic. It presents an outline of a process of continuous discovery and learning that can be applied in a great variety of settings – from individuals to teams to whole organisations exploring ways to achieve change in a…
