Apr 28, 2020
Marcus is welcoming back Dr Toby Lowe to the show! The Covid-19 crisis has hit the world and so many things have changed in the short time since we talked to Toby last. Particularly, ideas on complexity and systems thinking have suddenly gained a lot of traction as people realise that the world is indeed an uncertain place and the certainty that we imagined to be in, pre-crisis, was not to last forever. Marcus discusses with Toby how this plays out in the world of social interventions, which has many parallels with the world of international development, as we found out in the last episode.
The chat with Toby was guided by the three elements of the new paradigm of social interventions that Toby and colleagues have describe in their report Exploring the new World (see link below): human learning systems.
Here a brief summary of the points made about human learning systems:
Besides the three elements of human learning systems, Toby and Marcus also touched upon other aspects like the question of which decisions should be taken centrally on a national level and which decisions should better be devolved to the local level to people with knowledge of the context, which led to a really interesting discussion.
Resources referenced: