This blog draws on postgraduate research, which explored how international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) learn and make strategic decisions in a period of growing uncertainty.
Introduction:
International development is navigating a period of profound change. Overlapping global crises are placing increasing pressure on development actors, while international aid budgets continue to contract. Within this shifting landscape, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) have become both central and contested actors, operating across geographies and scales to respond rapidly to crises, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
At the same time, INGOs face growing expectations to demonstrate effectiveness, accountability, and adaptability. In response, many have become increasingly professionalised, investing in management systems, results-based frameworks, evaluations, and knowledge platforms to support learning while also strengthening credibility. These shifts have also increased expectations for INGOs to function as learning organisations, capable of reflecting systematically on experience to reflexively adjust their practices in increasingly complex contexts. Much of this emphasis on organisational learning has focused on systems and processes, such as reporting frameworks and knowledge management tools. Far less is understood about how learning actually flows into practice.
Against this backdrop, my research examined whether and how learning is translated into organisational strategy and how staff across different roles and geographies engage with such processes. The study centred around two core, complementary questions: how does organisational learning inform strategy development within INGOs, and how do staff across organisational levels and geographies engage with these strategies to guide decision-making?
Research context:
To explore these interrelated questions, my research examined learning processes within an INGO based in the Global North and working across geographies. In particular, it examined how relationships, organisational hierarchies, and accountability pressures influence how learning is created, shared, and ultimately translated and used in strategic decision-making.
The findings are based on a rigorous thematic analysis of fourteen semi-structured interviews with staff based at head office and within country offices, alongside a review of organisational documents such as strategies, evaluations, and internal learning processes. Data collection took place during a period of significant transition, as the organisation was revising its global strategy while simultaneously dealing with staffing disruptions and redundancies linked to major USAID funding cuts. Though challenging, this moment offered a unique opportunity to explore how organisational learning and strategy-making interact under conditions of heightened uncertainty and financial pressure.
Headline findings:
Findings from this study reveal several interlinked dynamics shaping organisational learning. While learning was relational in practice, structural dependence on institutional funding emerged as a defining influence, shaping accountability pressures, knowledge flows, and how staff engaged with strategy.
1) Learning is relational
While the organisation has invested in learning systems and platforms, learning in practice depended far more on relationships, trust, and individual roles. Managers shaped whether reflection was encouraged or reduced to compliance, while advisors acted as key brokers, synthesising insights across countries and translating learning into organisational guidance. Much learning occurred informally through conversations, field engagement, and peer exchange rather than through structured tools. These relational dynamics enabled reflection but also introduced fragility: learning often relied on a small number of motivated individuals and was unevenly embedded in roles or processes, leaving it vulnerable to staff turnover, management styles, and limited institutionalisation.
2) Accountability pressures reshape organisational learning and autonomy
The organisation’s reliance on institutional funding meant that donor frameworks not only shaped external reporting, but also internal learning processes and strategic priorities. Reflection and evidence-gathering were closely aligned with donor requirements, encouraging a focus on demonstrating results and narrowing space for deeper questioning. Evaluations and annual reviews were often framed to protect organisational reputation and funding prospects, reinforcing success narratives and limiting critical reflection. These dynamics became embedded in organisational routines through monitoring and evaluation systems designed around contractual indicators, tying learning closely to compliance. Over time, donor-defined evidence formed the basis of meta-evaluations and strategy development, meaning strategic content often reflected donor framings rather than a broader set of lessons from practice. Staff exercised agency within these constraints, but heavy reliance on external funding and limited unrestricted resources meant that learning was largely shaped by upward accountability.
3) Learning follows an uneven organisational geography
Learning within the organisation was also shaped by a clear spatial hierarchy, with knowledge flowing more easily from head office to country teams than in reverse. Despite operating through a decentralised model, learning from country offices, partners, and communities was often mediated before reaching strategic spaces, concentrating strategic influence closer to organisational centres. Partners were primarily engaged for delivery rather than as co-producers of learning, and while consultation had increased, decision-making authority largely remained at the centre.
Internal knowledge flows reflected similar asymmetries. Strategy was disseminated through formal documents and templates, while learning from the field moved upward more informally and inconsistently, often relying on advisors to translate local experience into strategic language. Advisors helped surface insights that might otherwise be lost, but also shaped which knowledge was legitimised. Access to learning spaces was further constrained by workload,
connectivity, language, and role, meaning those closest to implementation often had the least opportunity to participate in organisational learning. Although learning fed into strategy through evaluations, reviews, research, and country experience, its influence depended on timing, leadership, and usability. Together, these dynamics meant that learning entered strategy unevenly, shaped less by proximity to implementation than by proximity to organisational power.
Looking ahead, making learning matter:
This research shows that organisational learning in INGOs can be fragile, uneven, and shaped by power. For the organisation at the centre of this study, learning was enabled through relationships, trust, and individual leadership, but constrained by donor dependence, fear of failure and an uneven authority over whose knowledge counted.
These dynamics converged in strategy processes as well. While strategies are intended to translate learning into organisational direction, the evidence feeding into them was often shaped by donor frameworks and internal hierarchies, meaning alignment depended heavily on individual brokers such as advisors and managers.
From this analysis, several practical priorities emerge for INGOs seeking to strengthen organisational learning:
- Create space for reflection beyond compliance, including protected time and processes that normalise learning from challenges and failure, not only from success.
- Reduce structural dependence on institutional donors, including by expanding unrestricted funding, to strengthen organisational autonomy and support learning practices.
- Embed learning more consistently into strategy, ensuring that strategy development draws on perspectives across organisational levels and partners, not only those closest to headquarters.
- Treat country teams and local partners as co-producers of learning, rather than primarily as sources of data or delivery agents.
More broadly, these findings speak to wider debates about power, localisation, and whose knowledge shapes development practice. Until INGOs shift how learning is defined, resourced, and governed, organisational learning risks remaining performative rather than transformative. Creating strategies that function as living tools, grounded in diverse experience and open reflection, offers one pathway toward moving beyond doing things right, toward more consistently doing the right things in complex development contexts.
Note: This blog post draws on reflections from recently conducted research that will be further developed in forthcoming academic publications.
Photo by Curated Lifestyle via Unsplash.
