Who funds educational materials on digital and AI for public affairs? They are hard to find. — Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age We are having a hard time to find organisations that can fund the development of open-access materials on digital technologies and AI in the public sector. Pontus Westerberg, Executive Director ...

"This means that the vast majority of students preparing for careers in public service will graduate without learning how to oversee the technologies that are reshaping the institutions that they will work in" www.teachingpublicservice.digital/en/news/who-...

Investing In The Ecosystems That Sustain Us | NOEMA Making the economic case for nature is an essential task for securing development in our planetary age.

China is the leading adopter of Gross Ecosystem Product worldwide. Over the past decade, local governments across the country have implemented it to promote nature-positive goods. The technology hub of Shenzhen was one of the earliest to do so www.noemamag.com/investing-in...

Supporting practical integration of systems thinking in monitoring, evaluation and learning 360systemsguide.com

India’s Search for Digital Sovereignty | TechPolicy.Press Prateek Waghre discusses India’s push for tech sovereignty amid volatile US ties, digital dependence, and global shifts in trade.

"Conversations about “internet sovereignty” should not mistakenly assume that the exercise of sovereign state power over corporations will necessarily translate into greater agency for its people" www.techpolicy.press/indias-searc...

School of Creativity and Democracy: connecting affections, reimagining democracy School of Creativity and Democracy

"We present the School of Creativity and Democracy, a training itinerary to prepare new professionals of deliberation in the participatory elaboration of public policies" journal.platoniq.net/en/wilder-jo...

Re-thinking AI: How a Group of Civic Technologists Discovered the Power of AI to Rebuild Trust in Government After two years of research, the RethinkAI collaborative released Making AI Work for the Public—a comprehensive field review of how U.S. governments adopt AI. Since 2019, over 1,600 AI-related bills h...

"We celebrated saving time and money, not realizing that residents weren’t impressed by faster bureaucracies; they wanted different bureaucracies, more human ones, more accountable ones" rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/rethink...

The Role and Potential of Social Agriculture: How to Support the Young Farmers Driving Food System Transformation in Africa | Caribou Young African farmers are transforming agriculture through social media. Discover how “social agriculture” is reshaping food systems.

The role and potential of social agriculture caribou.global/publications...

Art as Knowledge – Why research needs a non-aligned revolution - Impact of Social Sciences Drawing on political theories of non-alignment, Annalena Oppel argues universities should take a more plural approach to art as research.

Just as non-alignment advocates are not accepting a priori the positions of any of the Great Powers, researchers could refuse to accept a priori that Western scientific methods are inherently superior to artistic ways of knowing blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Where are the public sector reformers? Help us find them! When I joined the Institute for Government in 2013, the Government Digital Service (version 1.0) was in full swing. It provided an obvious…

Where are the public sector reformers? Help us find them! medium.com/kinship-work...

Can a Conference Be Experimental? Reflections from the 6th Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (CFXS 2025)…

Can a conference be experimental? www.innovationgrowthlab.org/blog/can-a-c...

The value of public R&D

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term
www.gov.uk/government/p...

"Consider participatory theatre that reveals community knowledge invisible to surveys, or murals that serve as political messenger... These aren’t ‘soft’ alternatives to ‘hard’ research. They are different technologies of knowledge"

Art as Knowledge – Why research needs a non-aligned revolution - Impact of Social Sciences Drawing on political theories of non-alignment, Annalena Oppel argues universities should take a more plural approach to art as research.

Just as non-alignment advocates are not accepting a priori the positions of any of the Great Powers, researchers could refuse to accept a priori that Western scientific methods are inherently superior to artistic ways of knowing blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Beyond unicorns: capabilities in delivering and measuring more inclusive innovation By Adrian Johnston, Alex Glennie, Robyn Klingler-Vidra, Ida Uusikyla, Xoan Fernandez Garcia, and Parima Suwannakarn

Beyond unicorns: capabilities in delivering and measuring more inclusive innovation medium.com/@undp.innova...

The Role and Potential of Social Agriculture: How to Support the Young Farmers Driving Food System Transformation in Africa | Caribou Young African farmers are transforming agriculture through social media. Discover how “social agriculture” is reshaping food systems.

The role and potential of social agriculture caribou.global/publications...

What have we learned from setting up large-scale adaptive management programmes? - Activism Influence and Change A new research programme is tracking 3 big aid programmes in the Pacific, each of which claims to be ‘doing’ Adaptive Management. The first paper (and this blog summary) compares the enabling and cons...

What have we learned from setting up large-scale adaptive management programmes? blogs.lse.ac.uk/activism-inf...

Medicine is uncertain: embracing that makes doctors better | Aeon Essays From late-night calls to unsolved symptoms, uncertainty is woven into every doctor’s day. They should learn to embrace it

Great article - researching why the medical profession is so resistant to uncertainty (we need the equivalent for gov't) aeon.co/essays/medic...

The Global Polytunity Yuen Yuen Ang sees cascading crises as a rare opportunity for the transformation of development institutions and ideas.

"The polycrisis is a Western-centric narrative masquerading as global... The conversation on polycrisis rarely, if ever, acknowledges the agency of the non-Western world or the solutions it has offered" www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/p...

When states eat forests When digitalization builds power over not power to

[What could possibly go wrong] Buoyed by the example of Estonia and riding a wave of international enthusiasm, Kenya began embarking on a government digitalization initiative back in 2013 with funding from the World Bank/IFC developmentekko.substack.com/p/when-state...

It's Time to Talk About How We Actually Do Multi-Stakeholder Governance in Digital Public Infrastructure | Caribou How can digital public infrastructure be governed for the common good? Caribou and Co-Develop explore practical lessons.

"We examine concrete examples like Brazil’s PIX Forum, which convened banks, fintechs, small businesses, and civil society to collectively shape a payment system that has achieved remarkable adoption and equity" caribou.global/publications...

Banking on Innovation: Exploring the interplay between fintech startups, banks, and telcos to shape Africa’s financial landscape on Briter (formerly Briter Bridges) Read the latest report on Banking on Innovation: Exploring the interplay between fintech startups, banks, and telcos to shape Africa’s financial landscape from Briter (formerly Briter Bridges) Researc...

Banking on Innovation: exploring the interplay between fintech startups, banks, and telcos to shape Africa’s financial landscape www.briter.co/insights/rep...

Government Gains with Philadelphia — Code for America An interview with Nicola Coakley, the Research and Policy Manager for the Managing Director’s Office in the City of Philadelphia.

Most social safety net programs use an application-based model, but that causes administrative burdens. Zero Fare instead is designed to reduce barriers by using automatic enrollment codeforamerica.org/news/governm...

Bootleg Griot Library

Bootleg Griot is an independent public library project driven by the desire to actively collect, preserve, and showcase works from artists, collectives, and writers of African descent bootleggriot.com

"We need new models of professionalism that do not center novelty, but consequence" blog.ronbronson.com/design-as-re...

Yet another attempt at moving beyond the traditional policy cycle representation (from the latest OECD STI outlook) oecd.org/en/publicati...

Cashlite has arrived in Kenya. It just took a while. Thanks for reading Development Ekko!

The immediacy of individuals’ ability to make claims on their social network seems to have gone up and the value thresholds for helping out appear to have gone down, leading to what might be even more extensive networks of sharing and coping developmentekko.substack.com/p/cashlite-h...

Open data initiatives often operated under the assumption that releasing data was a compliance cost or public good with minimal return. The emerging paradigm reframes data commons as platforms for value creation, yielding innovation spillovers & social returns opendatapolicylab.org/articles/blo...

Can economics shake off its misconceptions about Africa? - Impact of Social Sciences Economic interventions in Africa come loaded with assumptions about the continent's history and the transferability of Western Economic ideas, can this change?

"Part of the tyranny of economic thinking about Africa stems from the sense that every piece of data, every story that comes out of the continent has to be tinged with a sense of tragedy" blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Medicine is uncertain: embracing that makes doctors better | Aeon Essays From late-night calls to unsolved symptoms, uncertainty is woven into every doctor’s day. They should learn to embrace it

Great article - researching why the medical profession is so resistant to uncertainty (we need the equivalent for gov't) aeon.co/essays/medic...

The decline of the West and the rise of ‘the Rest’ will lead to a new world order The United States’ withdrawal from its international role will not result in global collapse, argues Amitav Acharya. Instead, we are on the verge of a ‘multiplex’ order, in which ‘re-globalization’ is...

The decline of the West and the rise of ‘the Rest’ www.chathamhouse.org/publications...