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Paper short abstract:

The paper will critically examine United Nations Development Programme's attempt to re-imagine development programming through its Accelerator Labs initiative by focusing on how innovation is conceptualized and delivered.

Paper long abstract:

There is a growing recognition in the international development sector that the business-as-usual, top-down, technocratic approach to development will no longer aid us in our pursuit of such lofty goals as Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030. Due to this, organizations like UNDP are spearheading actions that radically re-imagine how development is conceptualized, delivered, and evaluated. As part of this direction, iterative (and inductive) approaches such as design thinking, ethnography, and positive deviance is being touted along with other deductive methods including systems science, foresight, and sensemaking within the mantra of 'adaptive management' are becoming widely adopted. I argue that the proliferation of innovative methods in the sector is necessary but not sufficient. First, innovation methods are still relatively new to international development and are premised on the value of plurality without explicitly stated theoretical assumptions (and theory of change). In this sense, it is similar to supposedly atheoretical methods such as RCTs. Second, innovation methods with varying theoretical (in terms of epistemology and ontology) assumptions can play a role in development programming as part of a mixed method to discover not 'what works', but 'why things work in a particular setting'. I will examine these developments as a reflexive self-evaluation of my journey as a Head of Solutions Mapping (UNDP Mongolia) within the world's largest development network - UNDP Accelerator Labs.