Welcome to the first issue of the Evolving Impact newsletter, a weekly exploration of technology, culture, and complexity in global development and humanitarian aid.
Dear reader,
My name is Ian McClelland. I set up Evolving Impact because I believe the scope of today’s challenges and the accelerating pace of technological and cultural change demands a shift in the management of public organisations. This newsletter is a place for me to reflect, learn, and attempt to make my case, building on my experiences supporting innovation in the aid sector.
From 2011 to 2014, I worked in communications for Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, home to the Humanitarian Innovation Project. From 2016 to 2023, I worked for Elrha’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund, latterly as a Senior Innovation Manager. Most recently, until July 2024, I was an Innovation Lead for Save the Children International.
This period has largely coincided with humanitarian innovation’s own hype cycle, from the peak of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment. The beginning of the humanitarian sector’s ‘innovation turn’ is often identified as the ‘innovations fair’ at the 25th ALNAP Annual Meeting in 2009.1 By 2016, innovation was centre-stage as one of four main themes at the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS).
Announced at the WHS, the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation (GAHI) launched in 2017, but closed abruptly in 2019 amid calls for a rethink.2 Similarly, the Dutch Coalition for Humanitarian Innovation (DCHI) launched in 2016 before closing in 2022 after a significant period of transition into a partnership with WorldStartup.3 Today, the attention of the biggest donors appears to be waning, or at least consolidating.
Ultimately, it is difficult to escape the findings of a recent (Jan 2024) article in the Journal of International Humanitarian Action by Maximilian Bruder and Thomas Baar from UNU-Merit. Their conclusion is fairly damning: “Fundamentally, it is unclear to what degree humanitarian innovation has had a positive impact on humanitarian practices and whether it can achieve transformative change.”4
Bruder and Baar’s conclusion reflects Kristin Sandvik’s critique that humanitarian innovation lacks an explicit theory of change — a coherent story of how investments in innovation can meet the WHS promise of “transformation through innovation.” Sandvik suggests the theory lies in a turn towards the logic of the market and new technology as catalysts for improvement in humanitarian aid.5
Bruder and Baar identify several further shortcomings in the discussion of innovation in the sector, suggesting it is “fragmented, lacks conceptual clarity, and fails to coherently identify the most potent levers for impact.” They recommend “future research should focus on providing clear definitions and explicit analyses of the characteristics of humanitarian innovation.” This is roughly where I will start.
Using these findings and criticisms as a jumping-off point, the following issues of this newsletter will apply a systems lens to delve into the nature of innovation and technology and the relationship between them, and the applicability of an evolutionary logic to compliment the dominant logics borrowed from business schools, design consultancies, and Silicon Valley startups.
I am certainly not the first to champion a systems perspective on innovation. Ben Ramalingam discussed the interplay of complex systems and technological innovation in Aid on the Edge of Chaos,6 GAHI advocated for improved system innovation capabilities,7 and the UNDP Strategic Innovation team are arguably leading the way in practice. Many other colleagues are similarly banging the drum.
However, my sense is that there is room for some repetition and another perspective and so I hope to make a useful contribution, starting from first principles.
Stay tuned!
What else?
⛑️ An extract from a new book by WFP’s Jean-Martin Bauer, published in The Guardian, covers the shifting ground of the battle against hunger and the fraught potential of new technology in humanitarian settings
⚡️ An essay by Roman Krznaric for Aeon magazine argues transformative change arises from the meeting of visionary ideas, disruptive social movements, and some kind of crisis
📱 A new report by AccessNow, summarised in ICT Works, suggests a convergence whereby humanitarian actors are turning into tech services providers, and tech service providers are turning into de facto humanitarian actors
🧠 In Stanford Social Innovation Review, Kevin Barenblat and Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink propose a framework for “AI-powered nonprofits” emphasising the flexibility of AI as a platform, and its use in advising, structuring data, and translation
🌐 The UK Design Council has launched a new Systemic Design Framework and toolkit for addressing complex challenges in a holistic and sustainable way
Need support?
I have some work capacity in the next few months. If you need any help with strategy, project design, and/or research and learning, I'd love to hear from you.
And finally: This newsletter is pretty niche. If you know anyone else interested in digging beneath the jargon and buzzwords to explore the nature of innovation and what it means for development and humanitarian impact, please share it with them.
I write as way to process, learn, and express myself, so everything is typed by hand without any inputs from AI. I sometimes use ChatGPT and Perplexity for brainstorming, research, and relating concepts, but all sources are cross-checked, reviewed, and referenced.
For example: Scott-Smith, T. (2016) ‘Humanitarian neophilia: the “innovation turn” and its implications’, Third World Quarterly, 37(12), pp. 2229–2251. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1176856.
Parker, B. (2019) ‘Humanitarian innovation faces rethink as innovators take stock’, The New Humanitarian, 20 March. Available at: https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2019/03/20/humanitarian-innovation-faces-rethink-innovators-take-stock.
DCHI (2022) ‘DCHI & WorldStartup Partnership Announcement’, DCHI Newsletter, August. Available at: https://mailchi.mp/dchi/partnership-announcement-worldstartup?e=56075f50a8.
Bruder, M. and Baar, T. (2024) ‘Innovation in humanitarian assistance—a systematic literature review’, Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 9(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-023-00144-3.
Sandvik, K.B. (2017) ‘Now is the time to deliver: looking for humanitarian innovation’s theory of change’, Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 2(1), p. 8. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-017-0023-2.
Ramalingam, B. (2013) Aid on the Edge of Chaos: Rethinking International Cooperation in a Complex World. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/aid-on-the-edge-of-chaos-9780199578023.
McClure, D. (2019) Innovation 3.0: Building a Creative Ecosystem to Tackle Humanitarian Aid’s Most Complex Challenges - GAHI. London: Elrha/GAHI. Available at: https://www.elrha.org/researchdatabase/gahi-innovation-3-0-building-creative-ecosystem/.