Lessons in Failure: Applying an Organizational Learning Framework to Understanding Attitudes Towards Failure in Development

This paper applies an organizational learning framework to explore attitudes towards failure in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) development sector. It draws on 35 key-informant interviews, contextualized by organizational theory and existing scholarship on failure in development, to underst...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Charlotte Weekly
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SAGE Publishing 2021-09-01
Series:Environmental Health Insights
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1177/11786302211044348
Description
Summary:This paper applies an organizational learning framework to explore attitudes towards failure in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) development sector. It draws on 35 key-informant interviews, contextualized by organizational theory and existing scholarship on failure in development, to understand the challenges faced by WASH practitioners in identifying failure, analyzing failure, and deliberate experimentation. Through interrogating past and present initiatives for publicizing failure in development, this paper digs deeper into the successes, obstacles, and lessons learnt from mainstreaming failure into organizational practices. It then synthesizes these findings to advance a 3-tier conceptual map for organizations to build an enabling environment for learning from failure in development.
ISSN:1178-6302