Welcome to CARE Insights

Co-authored by Rebecca Haines, CARE Senior Governance Advisor; Tam O’Neil, CARE Senior Gender Advisor; and Emily Brown, Oxfam Gender and Governance Adviser.

For many development professionals, political economy has become the gold standard of foundational analysis for programming. It helps us to understand how power and resources are distributed in a society or sector and is important for ensuring our programmes and campaigns avoid cookie-cutter technical solutions and are designed for real world impact.

Working in consortium to deliver large, complex programmes has become the norm for NGOs over the last few years. Increasingly, working in consortium is a clear expectation set out in donor tenders and calls for proposals. But is the sector taking this approach for the right reasons? And do donors really understand what it means to work in consortium, or do they just see it as a way for them to save some of their own time and money?

Gender equality and inclusive governance are each acknowledged to be key cross-cutting issues vital for ensuring sustainable development. In two recent reports, CARE Australia examined the impacts and the lessons to be gained from considering how these two approaches intersect in practice. The studies draw on over eight years of governance programming in Papua New Guinea and have been analysed using CARE’s Inclusive Governance and Gender Equality frameworks.