Development and the Learning Organisation

As development NGOs and official aid agencies embrace the idea of "becoming a learning organisation", they are increasingly concerned with some form of knowledge generation and organizational learning. To date, the literature on these issues tended to come out of the private sector and reflect a Western worldview. This book presents contributions from development scholars and practitioners from a range of institutional backgrounds around the world, some introducing new approaches and models, others offering critical case studies of individual and group learning practice across cultures, and organizational efforts to put theory into practice. Among the lessons to emerge from this work are that learning is hard to do, that we often learn the wrong things and that huge gaps often remain between our learning and our behaviour or practice. There are clearly no simple recipes for success, but when learning breakthroughs do occur, the organizational whole can truly become more than the sum of its parts.