Over the past decade, efforts to promote and strengthen transparency and accountability (T/A) have proliferated. Yet the impact of these interventions is questionable. Increasingly, organizations working in the T/A field have realized they need to ‘think politically’ about the changes they hope to promote. But what does thinking politically mean in practice? And how do organizations move from thinking politically to working politically?
Brendan Halloran explores these issues in a new Think Piece, and outlines possibilities for translating political thinking into politically-informed practice through organizational strategies and a focus on understanding change. Brendan highlights that thinking politically needs to be understood not as a tool, but as an approach to supporting change in complex social and political systems. This approach has implications regarding strategy and funding, theories of change, and evaluation and learning.