The law, development and governance field is replete with good ideas that are intended to inform programming and ensure improved outcomes. Research, piloting, reviews, and monitoring and evaluation are all intended to advance and test such ideas within donor-funded programs. Too often, we find that these good ideas (and the normative concepts and research that underlies them) do not translate into good practice. Or they produce unintended consequences. Or the structures into which the ideas are released actively undermine them. 

 In a similar way, we also find good practice that exists in particular sites and projects of law and justice interventions fails to surface to the the ‘animating ideas’ level, or to be translated in ways that might allow it to travel or be replicated elsewhere. 

The 2019 annual workshop for the Law and Justice Development Community of Practice will explore this relationship between ideas and practice, examining how the structure and politics of our industry and the professional communities we occupy, produce this disjuncture. Discussions will focus on unpacking how ideas translate (or fail to translate) into practice and how practice is evolving – both locally and internationally – in ways that require our thinking to change.

The end of year workshop is a full-day event in the style of the COP’s previous three-years of workshops, bringing together practitioners, policy makers and researchers from across the government, policing, non-profit, commercial, and academic communities. View the program here.