The research here was inspired by experience in recent years working with several local civil society organizations in which capacity is not an issue. The leaders of these organizations are highly-educated, have interacted for many years with international donors, are sophisticated in their understanding of programming, and yet still have difficulty developing the types of project logics international donors are requiring.
So the question becomes, is there something more else going on than a lack of knowledge or a lack of capacity that explains this difficulty in developing project logic. As a way of exploring this question, the paper presents the hypothesis that organizations embedded in a conflict-affected area will tend to describe their projects in fundamentally different ways than external organizations.
Specifically, the paper uses the distinction between “holistic” and “analytic” systems of thought, concepts originally developed in the field of cross-cultural psychology, to hypothesize that embedded organizations develop project logics that are more holistic while external organizations develop more analytic project logics. This hypothesis is tested by analyzing the project summaries for 235 proposals submitted to USIP in 2009 and 2010. The data support the hypothesis that there is a systematic difference in the way embedded and external organizations develop their theories of change.
An alternative hypothesis is then tested, namely that cultural differences between western and non-western organizations explains this difference. The evidence for the alternative hypothesis is mixed and therefore cultural differences cannot be ruled out as a factor that accounts for the differences in the project logics.v
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