From Proximate Insight to System Change
The Missing Link in Development Practice
There is a recurring frustration in development practice.
We talk about localization or proximity funding. We design for local ownership. We acknowledge that context matters.
And yet, when you look across programs and over time, locally generated insight rarely accumulates into sustained change.
Work moves, but it doesn’t quite build.
Part of the explanation is familiar: donor systems are still structured to prioritize upward accountability — reporting, verification, compliance — over learning and adaptation. That is not new.
What is less often discussed is what actually keeps cooperation moving despite these constraints.
Across very different settings, you see the same pattern. Things don’t fall apart entirely. People find ways to coordinate. Information travels — sometimes. Relationships hold long enough to get something done. Some initiatives connect to what came before instead of starting from scratch.
This is not accidental.
It is the result of a kind of work that is widely relied on and rarely specified.
Get Florencia Guerzovich’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In the paper I’ve just published with the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice and Accountability lab — Letting Go, Without Losing Coherence — I discuss this invisible weaving and its enabling conditions.
Moving from metaphor to practice
The paper tries to do three practical things:
- Make this work legible
Not as a metaphor, but as a set of recurring functions that show up across contexts. - Offer concrete ways to recognize effectiveness
Rules of thumb to identify when convening, routing, and translation are actually working and resilient — and when they drift. - Outline how to support it without breaking it
Not by turning it into another compliance requirement, but by resourcing the conditions that allow it to happen in more systematic ways.
This leads to a different way of thinking about accountability. Not as tighter control, or as full discretion. But as the ability to maintain coherence while adapting to change.
Why this matters now
Under current funding pressures, many systems are being pushed toward a choice between:
- double down on what is easily measured
- or move toward looser, hands-off approaches that are difficult to sustain institutionally
Both miss something important.
The connective work that allows cooperation to function is already happening — many hold the accountability-learning tension in practice, informally and in ad hoc ways. The question is whether we choose to see it — and whether we can support it more intentionally and systematically without undermining it.
The full paper goes into the evidence and practical implications in more detail:
