Cultural norms can thwart the most technically sound development strategies. How can the cultural consensus model, developed by anthropologists, help to ensure that culture strengthens rather than weakens a strategy's effectiveness?
Blog Post
Understanding cultural norms is essential to achieving development results but can sometimes be difficult. The authors of this paper tested a novel method to monitor and evaluate a USAID justice project in the West Bank, Palestine.
Resource - Paper
What needs to change to create the conditions necessary for communities to pursue sustainability? Michael Brown, Samantha Cheng, and Jim Tolisano propose a two step solution.
Blog Post
This paper examines how conservation practitioners can learn from the effort to question the utility of community engagement, adapt lessons to bridge conservation and development more effectively, and apply the limited funds available to conservation to accomplish more on the ground.
Resource - Paper
This paper uses systematic synthesis methods to assess the state of the peer-reviewed evidence base on community engagement interventions linked to terrestrial conservation projects. Specifically, it examines the relationships between different engagement approaches and land tenure/governance structures.
Resource - Paper
ASU anthropologists are tracking cultural shifts that could spell safety for Mozambique's coastal communities.
Blog Post
Gabriel Gonzalez-Kreisberg explores the role that incubators and accelerators will play in the future of development, and discusses four new "solutions labs" created by Chemonics and Arizona State University based on the incubator model.
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Former chief of party Ryan Smith discusses the challenges of measuring results on countering violent extremism programs and shares what his project learned in Kenya.
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