Development interventions are more effective when they are informed by a solid understanding of context – whether international, regional, country-level, sectoral or local. To get real benefits from aid and minimise the risk of doing harm, development actors need to appreciate the political, economic and social ‘rules of the game’ in the places where they work, as well as the structure of incentives and the nature of the prevailing networks of interest and power. They must also be sensitive to the uncertainties involved in complex change processes and their implications for politically smart and adaptive programme design and delivery.

The Policy Practice has been running and continually updating our flagship ‘Political Economy Analysis in Action’ course since 2008, in collaboration with the Overseas Development Institute. Our trainers are all leading practitioners with years of experience of undertaking political economy analysis across the globe.

Our course is currently running from 20 February to 23 June 2023. For further information, please see our course flyer. If you would like to be notified of our next course to be run in September, please fill out the form here.

In addition to our flagship course, we offer a range of related services from shorter, bespoke training courses, to ongoing support to teams and organisations and mentoring for practitioners. We run our courses both online and face-to-face. We design courses for individual organisations, as well as running courses which are open for all to apply.

Our courses are designed for a wide variety of development and diplomatic professionals including advisers, programmes designers, managers and implementers from:

• foreign affairs ministries
• bilateral and multilateral development organisations
• development and conflict prevention non-governmental organisations
• foundations
• private sector implementing organisations
• research institutes and think tanks

Through our course, participants will:

• Learn what political economy analysis is and why it matters
• Explore political economy concepts and how to use them
• Interact with leading experts on political economy analysis and thinking and working politically on a weekly basis
• Work through real-life case studies applying political economy tools to development challenges
• Participate in regular webinars with other course participants
• Learn how to ‘think and work politically’ in their own work
• Participants work both independently and in small groups to complete weekly tasks

If you would like further information on our training courses, please email training@thepolicypractice.com.