Thinking about change for development practice: a case study from Oxfam GB

Abstract

Development practice is informed by theories of change, but individuals and organisations may not make them explicit. Practitioners may be unaware of the extent to which strategic choices and debates are informed by disparate thinking about how history happens and the role of purposeful intervention for progressive social change. In the past few years, some Oxfam GB staff have been creating processes to debate their theories of change as part of an effort to improve practice. In this context, the authors introduce four sets of ideas about change, with a discussion of how they have been explored in two instances, and some of the challenges emerging from this process. Through explicitly debating theories of change, organisational decision-making processes can be better informed and strategic choices made more transparent.

Keywords:

• Aid
• Civil Society
• Methods
• Western Europe

Acknowledgements

The authors jointly designed and ran the two UKPP workshops on social change described in the second section of this article. We are grateful to Becky Buell and Fran Bennett for comments and inputs. Thalia Kidder and Jo Rowlands are grateful to members of the Oxfam International labour-rights team and the Intermón Oxfam staff in Morocco for their enthusiastic collaboration with the process of discussing change strategies. Rosalind Eyben is grateful for the support provided by the Power, Participation, and Change programme at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) (funded by DFID, Sida, and SDC) for working with Oxfam GB on this project, and to her colleagues at IDS for feedback on a first draft, as well as to an anonymous reviewer for the very helpful and constructive comments on a later draft.

The author

Rosalind Eyben is now a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, after a long career in the world of aid policy and practice. Contact details: Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, BN1 9RE,UK [email protected]

Thalia Kidder is Oxfam GB's Global Adviser on Labour and Gendered [email protected]

Audrey Bronstein is Oxfam GB's Deputy International Director and was the founding director of its UK Poverty [email protected]

Jo Rowlands is Oxfam GB's Global Programme Adviser on Institutional Accountability and Governance but was, at the time of writing, its UK Poverty Programme Quality Adviser. Contact details: Oxfam GB, John Smith Drive, Oxford OX4 2JY,UK. [email protected]

Notes

1. A participant at the second Oxfam GB workshop on models of social change, 24 May 2005.

2. These were freely adapted from Parker et al. (2003) and elaborated in an unpublished paper written for Oxfam GB.

3. However, building on Rawls, Sen (1992) introduced into development economics the idea that we are not all born equal but rather some have more capabilities than others (in terms, for example, of health and educational status), and that lack of these capabilities constrains free choice and therefore results in less ‘power to’.

4. For example, one workshop participant mentioned that his favoured theory of change is divine power.

5. Eyben was anecdotally informed that in an Oxfam GB workshop in another region of the world where the five theories of how history happens had been introduced to staff, thinking about change in any way other than through the fourth theory (supporting collective action) was firmly rejected because of the value that staff placed on it.