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Global challenges in practice: designing a development intervention
Global challenges in practice: designing a development intervention

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3 Challenges in designing development interventions

Development interventions seek to promote change. But change is complex and there are likely to be ‘winners and losers’ in any change process. Many of these cannot be predicted or even known. As interventions take place within complex systems there are likely to be anticipated and unanticipated outcomes, both negative and positive. By introducing ‘changes’ there is a risk of disrupting established ways of doing things and the changes can end up causing more harm than good.

As you progress through this week and the rest of this course, you might want to consider how development interventions can avoid causing harm and maximise their positive outcomes. Is it possible to avoid all harm to any woman or man, boy or girl, now or in future generations, or to the environment and the planet? How do we factor this into the design of interventions?

This challenge can seem overwhelming. It is important to recognise that development actors are one among many drivers of change. And that change is a constant not something that can be initiated alone. The role may be to increase the ability of the least powerful in society to cope with changes that are taking place, rather than decide if change will happen or not.

Development projects, understood as purposeful interventions to promote good social change, face significant challenges in achieving success. So development actors have to embark on the process of project design with their eyes open – with an awareness of these problems and pitfalls and using a suitable set of approaches, methods and tools – in order to increase the chances of success. These are issues discussed in more detail in the following sections.