Development and the Learning Organisation: an introduction

Why a Development in Practice Reader on development and the learning organisation? We were aware that an increasing number of NGOs, particularly some of the large international ones, as well as some bilateral and multilateral actors, were embracing the idea of ‘becoming a learning organisation’. Over the past decade, as NGOs have either rushed into the mainstream in their claims of innovative and effective practice, or have tried to transform themselves to fit new realities, organisational learning has emerged as one way to live up to expectations and needs. Certainly, it is difficult to find organisations that are not touting the importance of knowledge generation and organisational learning in one form or another. We were curious to know how practitioners were approaching the issue of learning in organisations and whether their approaches were yielding positive results. We were especially interested because much of the writing and thinking on learning organisations has come out of the private sector, and we wondered how applicable and how useful development practitioners were finding it in their own field. This Reader is based on a special issue of Development in Practice, which we were invited to guest edit. As readers will see, our call for papers for this issue generated an interesting mix of responses and cases, ranging from major organisational transformation efforts significantly informed by learning organisation theory to micro-level