Abstract
This paper examines the tension within international development programmes between traditional task-oriented approaches to development and the wider view of programmes as sites for adaptability and learning. It characterises it as a set of inter-related tensions between recursive and adaptive tendencies that exist at individual actor, programme and institutional levels. Drawing on a multiple interpretive case study of partnership based programmes between an international non-government organisation and local partners in three countries, it looks at how these tensions play out in practice. Based on the findings, it proposes an active response to the tensions called project facilitation. This is an adaptive and co-created process that incorporates local experience and practice based knowledge to achieve strategic goals, while utilising recognised project management practices to achieve agreed outcomes. By adopting active responses to the tensions that exist within programmes it offers greater potential for effective delivery of long term benefits than the more typical defensive response strategies. Project facilitation is consistent with the social constructionist view of programmes and programme management but broadens our understanding by emphasising the need to actively consider how the tensions inherent in programmes are responded to.
Highlights
From its early conceptualisation as a framework for grouping existing projects and defining new projects (Pellegrinelli, 1997), programme management has evolved into an established method for managing complex, uncertain, and large-scale changes (Martinsuo & Hoverfält, 2018)
The international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) at the centre of the three case studies sees partnership based programmes as the means by which to achieve lasting change, with people empowered to act on their own behalf, challenge injustice, realize their human rights, and be agents of their own development
Since the objective of this study is to examine how programme management responds to tensions, rather than to provide an exhaustive analysis of the tensions that exist, we focus on illustrative examples of the tensions that arise at each level
Summary
From its early conceptualisation as a framework for grouping existing projects and defining new projects (Pellegrinelli, 1997), programme management has evolved into an established method for managing complex, uncertain, and large-scale changes (Martinsuo & Hoverfält, 2018). Projects are typically performance focused and task orientated (Rijke et al, 2014), while programmes are characterised by greater levels of complexity This is due to their longer duration, the sharing of resources across projects, the need for inter-project coordination, the divergence and interrelations between constituent projects, and the involvement of multiple stakeholders (Pellegrinelli, Partington, Hemingway, Mohdzain & Shah, 2007; Stretton, 2016; Wagner & Lock, 2016). In environments with these characteristics, standard programme management approaches can exacerbate tensions between the task-oriented view of projects and the strategy-focused and often emergent wider organisational view of programmes (Lycett et al, 2004). The increasing popularity of these practices in the international development (ID) sector differentiate it from other sectors in which approaches to programme management are less evolved in their use of evidence to inform adaptive decision-making
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