ABSTRACT
ActionAid was formed in the UK in 1972 as a child sponsorship charity. Since the 1970s it has undergone dramatic changes in its organisational structure and operational ethos. The organisation is now associated, among other things, with REFLECT (a pioneering adult literacy tool); the Accountability, Learning and Planning System (ALPS) (a similarly innovative attempt to deepen its accountability, particularly with the poor and excluded people with whom the organisation works); a decentralised structure and federal model of governance; and a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to development. By 2010 the organisation worked with 25 million people in over 40 countries. It works predominantly through local partner organisations – partners manage 75 per cent of its programmes. This chapter explores how and why the organisation and its approach have changed so dramatically over 40 years, and it does so through the prism of theories of change drawn from human rights and development (see chapter 1 in this volume). It addresses the following research question: How do (international) organisations change, and in particular how does the adoption of a new approach shape such change? The chapter focuses primarily on organisational, inward-looking change, but also touches on operational, outward-looking change, primarily because the two are difficult to disentangle.
