This document is a background course on effective advising in statebuilding and peacebuilding contexts. Asking powerful, compelling questions that matter is a central skill of an adviser, mentor or coach, or of a thought leader, seeking to catalyze in others the energies to develop competencies and capacities and to move towards a stronger future. This […]

This document is a background course on effective advising in statebuilding and peacebuilding contexts. This paper explores the practice of appreciative inquiry in advising, which aims at perceiving organizations as ‘social constructs’ that are produced and reproduced through conversations.

‘Technical Cooperation’ or ‘Technical Assistance’, mostly in the form of international experts and advisors, and loans and grants for ‘institutional reform’ constitute a huge share of official development assistance. Yet a growing body of comparative and cumulative evaluations, further bolstered by academic research, show that its overall effectiveness in terms of better functioning governments, is […]

Anyone interested in ‘change’ has an interest in understanding ‘power’, because ‘power’ is both one of the constraining factors to change and one of its enablers. This paper discusses the importance of understanding and working with power in multi-stakeholder processes.

Social and economic development, organizational development and institutional reform, statebuilding and peacebuilding, the delivery of social services and other public goods etc. are not solely ‘technical’ challenges. Around each of these and related issues we find competing interests, power asymmetries, perceptions about who benefits and loses from the status quo and from possible or proposed […]

Asking powerful, compelling questions that matter is a central skill of an adviser, mentor or coach, or of a thought leader, seeking to catalyze in others the energies to develop competencies and capacities and to move towards a stronger future. This paper looks at the art of asking catalytic questions as a key element of […]