How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? A Comparative Analysis of Organisational Learning Determinants in National Donor Bureaucracies

Janus, Heiner; Esser, Daniel E. Article — Published Version How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? A Comparative Analysis of Organisational Learning Determinants in National Donor Bureaucracies The European Journal of Development Research Provided in Cooperation with: Springer Nature Suggested Citation: Janus, Heiner; Esser, Daniel E. (2025) : How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? A Comparative Analysis of Organisational Learning Determinants in National Donor Bureaucracies, The European Journal of Development Research, ISSN 1743-9728, Palgrave Macmillan, London, Vol. 37, Iss. 4, pp. 792-811, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-025-00706-8 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/330536 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Vol:.(1234567890) The European Journal of Development Research (2025) 37:792–811 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-025-00706-8 ORIGINAL ARTICLE How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? AComparative Analysis ofOrganisational Learning Determinants inNational Donor Bureaucracies HeinerJanus1 · DanielE.Esser2 Accepted: 12 May 2025 / Published online: 25 June 2025 © The Author(s) 2025 Abstract We distil and validate a new theory of organisational learning (OL) to understand OL in foreign aid agencies. Reviewing existing scholarship on OL in the public sector, we devise a theorectical framework consisting of three variables that connect interacting dimensions co-determining theorganisation-specific intensity of OL: (1) individual knowledge acquisition, (2) social practices and (3) organisational political embeddedness. To validate our approach to studying OL empirically, we heed calls for more comparative research on OL by analysing 89 randomly sampled interviews with national development bureaucrats in Germany, South Korea and Norway. Our analysis demonstrates that our theoretical framework explains varying intensities of OL across the three cases. Crucially, it reveals the second dimension, social practices, to bedecisive. Whileall cases in our sample contain evidence of individual learning and awareness of the organisations’ context-specific political embeddedness, we observe distinct social practices in each organisation. The organisation in which OL is most vibrant is the only one in our sample social practices that aredirectly conducive to OL. These practices comprise unsanctioned negotiations of organisational objectives among staff, as well as a consensus to prioritise evidence and terminate failed projects, despite political pressures to spend more, faster. We conclude that future research on OL needs to eschew references to hypothetical best practices and instead study OL empirically and comparatively by connecting previously disjointed scholarly literaturesthrough theory. * Heiner Janus heiner[email protected] Daniel E. Esser [email protected] 1 German Institute ofDevelopment andSustainability (IDOS), Tulpenfeld 6, 53113Bonn, Germany 2 American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC20016, USA 793 How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? AComparative Analysis of… Keywords Bureaucrats· Development bureaucracy· Foreign aid· Organisational learning· Randomised interviews· Social practices Résumé Nous distillons et validons une nouvelle théorie de l’apprentissage organisationnel (AO) pour comprendre l’AO dans les agences d’aide étrangère. En examinant les recherches existantes sur l’AO dans le secteur public, nous élaborons un cadre théorique composé de trois variables qui relient les dimensions interactives co-déterminant l’intensité spécifique à l’organisation de l’AO: (1) l’acquisition de connaissances individuelles, (2) les pratiques sociales, et (3) l’ancrage politique organisationnel. Pour valider notre approche de l’étude empirique de l’AO, nous répondons aux appels pour davantage de recherches comparatives sur l’AO en analysant 89 entretiens échantillonnés au hasard avec des bureaucrates du développement national en Allemagne, en Corée du Sud et en Norvège. Notre analyse démontre que notre cadre théorique explique les intensités variables de l’AO dans les trois cas. De manière cruciale, elle révèle que la deuxième dimension, les pratiques sociales, est décisive. Tous les cas de notre échantillon contiennent des preuves d’apprentissage individuel et de conscience de l’ancrage politique contextuel des organisations; cependant, nous observons des pratiques sociales distinctes dans chacune des trois organisations. L’organisation où l’AO est la plus dynamique est la seule de notre échantillon à présenter des pratiques sociales directement propices à l’AO. Ces pratiques comprennent des négociations non sanctionnées des objectifs organisationnels parmi le personnel et un consensus pour donner la priorité aux preuves et mettre fin aux projets échoués malgré les pressions politiques pour dépenser plus, plus rapidement. Nous concluons que les recherches futures sur l’AO doivent éviter de se référer à des meilleures pratiques hypothétiques et plutôt étudier l’AO de manière empirique et comparative à travers une théorie reliant des littératures académiques auparavant disjointes. Resumen Destilamos y validamos una nueva teoría del aprendizaje organizacional (AO) para comprender el AO en las agencias de ayuda extranjera. Revisando la literatura existente sobre AO en el sector público, desarrollamos un marco teórico que consta de tres variables que conectan dimensiones interactivas que co-determinan la intensidad específica de AO en la organización: (1) adquisición de conocimiento individual, (2) prácticas sociales e (3) inserción política organizacional. Para validar empíricamente nuestro enfoque para estudiar el AO, prestamos atención a las llamadas a realizar más investigaciones comparativas sobre AO analizando 89 entrevistas seleccionadas al azar con burócratas nacionales de desarrollo en Alemania, Corea del Sur y Noruega. Nuestro análisis demuestra que nuestro marco teórico explica las diferentes intensidades de AO en los tres casos. Crucialmente, revela la segunda dimensión, las prácticas sociales, como decisiva. Todos los casos de nuestra muestra contienen evidencia de aprendizaje individual y conciencia de la inserción política específica del contexto de las organizaciones; sin embargo, observamos prácticas sociales distintas en cada una de las tres organizaciones. La organización donde el AO es más vibrante es la única en nuestra muestra que exhibe prácticas sociales directamente conducentes al 794 H.Janus, D.E.Esser AO. Estas prácticas comprenden negociaciones no sancionadas de los objetivos organizacionales entre el personal y un consenso para priorizar la evidencia y terminar proyectos fallidos a pesar de las presiones políticas para gastar más, más rápido. Concluimos que la investigación futura sobre AO necesita evitar referencias a prácticas hipotéticas óptimas y en su lugar estudiar el AO empírica y comparadamente a través de teorías que conecten literaturas académicas previamente desarticuladas. Introduction Organisations ostensibly need to learn in order to succeed. This dictum can be found across scholarly literature ranging from management research to public policy, as it purportedly holds for private and public organisations alike. Alerasoul etal. (2022: 1) put forward that “organisational learning (OL) is essential for the survival of an organisation”. According to Argote (2012: 36) “[o]rganizations learn from both successes and failures”, and organisational motivations to learn are correlated positively with the cost of failure (Argote 2012: 37). Notably, scholars have ranked the foreign aid sector as relatively open to learning from failure, on a par with the business, aviation, and technology sectors (Chambers etal. 2022; cf. Eger etal. 2022). At the same time, scholarly definitions of OL abound: Basten and Haamann (2018) review 405 publications on different types of OL and identify 45 distinct approaches. They conclude that nosingle approach appears to bemost appropriate and call for research to account for specific organisational contingencies (Basten and Haamann 2018: 14). In response, we devise a multi-dimensional theory of OL capable of explaining variation in OL intensity as a result of organisation-specific configurations. We heed recent calls for more comparative research on OL in the public sector (Cuffa and Steil 2019; Dahlström and Lapuente 2022; Iao-Jörgensen 2023). We select three national donor bureaucracies to validate its applicability to the foreign aid sector. Our research objective is to study OL “non-metaphorically” (Ron etal. 2006: 1084) by examining how these organisations actually learn, as opposed to prescribing how they should learn. Drawing on existing scholarship, we hypothesise that OL results from activities in three interconnected organisational dimensions: (1) individual knowledge acquisition, (2) social practices, and (3) organisational political embeddedness. We ask: how does OL occur in organisational settings characterised by different configurations of these three dimensions? Our theoretically guided empirical approach thus differs from scholarly contributions that resort to binaries of OL and suggest the existence of best practices. Examples ofthese binaries include the juxtaposition of “church-like organisations” producing “official branded knowledge” versus “open learning organisations” (Ellerman 1999), of a “linear model” of individual skill acquisition versus an “action learning approach” characterised by “cycles of action and reflection” (Johnson and Thomas 2007: 41); andOL occurring in either “Kafkaesk” or “representative bureaucracies” (Hoey 2015). We doubt that such heuristics can capture the diverse landscape of OL in foreign aid. Rather, they enable co-optation in the name of ostensibly ‘easy’ organisational reforms (McFarlane 2006; Chambers etal. 2022) 795 How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? AComparative Analysis of… and reflect a managerialist yearning for learning that is undertheorised and empirically unsubstantiated. We proceed as follows. Synthesising existing research seeking to explain OL empirically, we distil a three-tiered theoretical framework. This framework generats a working hypothesis that the intensity of OL is co-determined by three interrelated variables. Next, we present the methodology for our case selection and primary data collection. We then delve into a comparative analysis and discuss its main findings. We conclude by reviewing the validity of our theoretical framework and deriving implications for future research on OL in foreign aid and beyond. A Novel Theoretical Framework forOrganisational Learning For over two decades, aid agencies have been “touting the importance of knowledge generation and organisational learning in one form or another” (Roper and Pettit 2002: 1; McFarlane 2006) and chasing normative ‘best practices’ (Biggs and Smith 2003: 1745–1747; Ferguson etal. 2010). At the same time, there has been a persistent frustration about the dearth of evidence of OL. Gilson etal. (2009: 6; also Rashman etal. 2009) echo Ulrich etal.’s research from over 30 years ago (1993: 59) lamenting that “to date there have been far more thought papers on why learning matters than empirical research”. Taken together, we read the lack of compelling theories and the scarcity of empirics as an opportunity to distil and validate a novel theoretical framework to explain varying intensities of OL. The literature we review for this purpose suggests that three distinct but interrelated dimensions should be analysed together. Individual Knowledge Acquisition Individual learning is widely considered to be the foundation of OL. In one of the most rigorous empirical studies of OL, Ron etal. (2006: 1084) conceptualise OL as “individuals, collaborating in team settings […], process[ing] information relevant to the organization’s performance in a way that leads to systemic changes”. Individual knowledge acquisition thus serves as a necessary but insufficient condition for OL to occur; individual learning does not automatically translate into OL: “Increased individual capacity within one area of the organisation—or one organisation within the broader government—is unlikely to translate into a one-for-one improvement in overall performance and may sometimes be entirely disconnected from it” (Williams 2021: 345; cf. Vallejo and Wehn, 2016: 6). Scholars have proposed that effective transmission comprises technical platforms for knowledge management (Argote 2012: 20) as well as social processes that are centrally informed by individual identities (Brown etal. 2015: 271). Identities also co-determine individuals’ aspirations to pursue different career paths (Ingram 2023; Tangianu et al. 2025). These, in turn, position individuals differently in terms of their ability to induce organisational change based on individual knowledge. This can occur eitherhierarchically, from a position of authority, or catalytically, through 796 H.Janus, D.E.Esser social negotiation (Johnson and Thomas 2007: 46). While such social persuasion is more generative, it also carries greater professional and social risks (Loeffler 2021). Social Practices In a seminal article, Brown and Duguid (1991: 41) propose a causal relationship between “actual practices [and] the success or failure of organizations”. In addition to individual knowledge acquisition, our theoretical framework therefore needs to account for “staff’s everyday practices” within development bureaucracies (Eyben 2010: 384), focusing on actual routines as opposed to prescribed management interventions designed to produce OL. Catino and Patriotta (2013) provide evidence that such routines canbe either conducive or detrimental to OL. Similarly, Barette etal. (2012: 146) demonstrate empirically that “actions such as tolerating mistakes, questioning established rules, and being open to experience and change” contribute directly to what Rashman etal. (2009: 470) term “learn[ing] through collaborative action”. However, social practices conducive to OL face sector-specific challenges in foreign aid, as thebeneficiaries of individual aid projects typically live overseas and cannot provide direct feedback to donor bureaucrats. Meanwhile, bureaucrats are not held accountable by those whom they are supposed to serve but rather by political principals within their own polities(Esser and Janus 2025). This lack of external feedback can facilitate organisation-internal social practices that become self-referential and self-reinforcing. As a result, OL in development organisations often legitimises and perpetuatesexisting practices rather than facilitating collective reflection and risk-taking (Chambers etal. 2022: 6). At the same time, we should not expect highly idiosyncratic social practices, given that organisational mimicry is a wellknown phenomenon in the foreign aid sector (Gulrajani and Swiss 2019). Organisational Political Embeddedness The third variable in our theoretical framework accounts for the way in whichboth individual knowledge acquisition and social practicesare embedded in highly politicised environments (Gilson etal. 2009). OL in public organisations often occurs in settings marked by “resistance to change […]; a modest capacity to alter behaviour and organisational structures; a loss of learning continuities […] because of elections cycles and government successions; [being] often held harshly to account over ‘errors’; [and the] need to be seen by the public as successful” (Gilson etal. 2009: 20). Although internal social interaction is not necessarily regulated, public officials still act politically. At the same time, even the poorest performers in the public sector do not face the same competitive pressures as in the private sector (Williams 2021); existential concerns therefore do not actually trigger learning (cf. Argote 2012). As a result, OL in the public sector in the shape of “organizational self-correction as an adaptive mechanism” (Cuffa and Steil 2019: 113) is always reflective of political objectives. In extreme cases, “processes of knowledge acquisition [in the public sector] may be shaped 797 How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? AComparative Analysis of… by deliberate misrepresentation, opportunistic interest groups or by the emergence of dominant social constructions of problem and context” (Elliott 2009: 162). Political embeddedness does not render OL in foreign aid agencies solely reactive, in the sense of ‘learning despite politics’. Rather, individuals and groups within organisations actively seek to influence political dynamics engaging in ‘learning through politics’. In both cases, however, political embeddedness conditions OL and therefore needs to be reckoned with theoretically and empirically. We summarise the three dimensions of our framework and their interactions in Fig.1. Figure1 visualises our working hypothesis that the OLintensity is co-determined by three interrelated variables. Importantly, our reading of existing scholarship suggests that theinterrelation in this case is not sequential or additive, but multi-correlated. However, as this is the first approach to combine these three dimensions, we can only provide indicative guidance on how each variable interacts with the other two. The empirical component of our research therefore serves a dual purpose: first, to validate the framework’s variables and composition; and second, to reveal which interdimensional dynamics are observable in practice and how they affect OL. Fig. 1 Theoretical framework for organisational learning in foreign aid agencies. Source: Own representation 798 H.Janus, D.E.Esser Case Selection andPrimary Data Collection We purposely choose three national aid agencies out of a universe of cases comprising 32 members of the OECD DAC, a foreign aid “donors’ club” (Eyben 2013: 80) that defines global norms and standards for ODA (Verschaeve and Orbie 2016). We then randomly sample between 27 and 31 interviewees in each of these three agencies. We select informants in each organisation from a pool of officials working in substantive as well as administrative roles across different hierarchical levels and organisational units, including HQ and field offices where applicable. This approach ensures that our selectionis representative of the three agencies, while alsoyielding findings that are analytically relevant to other OECD DAC countries. Between August 2022 and March 2023, we conducted 89 interviews at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Republic of Korea’s International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). We justify this choice on the basis of three rationales. First, BMZ, KOICA, and Norad are comparable in that they each functions as the nodal point of a national development administration, translating political priorities for official development assistance (ODA) into programmes and projects. Second, the officials in these organisations are civil servants who respond to bureaucratic incentives and oversee organisations responsible for implementing projects. Third, a recent review classifies all three cases as prioritising autonomy over accountability (Dahlström and Lapuente 2022). Within this sample, Germany and Korea are characterised as “Weberian bureaucracies” with autonomous civil servants operating within rule-based structures, whereas Norway is described as a “liberal bureaucracy” combining autonomous civil servants with “managerial, flexible principles” (Dahlström and Lapuente 2022: 56–57). While the three organisations are thus comparable, differences in their institutional contexts are reflected by their sizes, policy approaches and local presence. BMZ was founded in 1961 and comprises nearly 1,300 staff members, around ten percent of whom serve as liaison staff at German embassies in partner countries. Its organisational units at headquarters (HQ) have both thematic and regional foci, and they cover “a wide swathe of issues and geographies” (Chen etal. 2023: 50). BMZ is formally responsible for allocating the majority of Germany’s ODA, arguably the world’s largest national aid donor after the de facto suspension of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) but has so far received limited attention from scholars (Esser and Janus 2023). KOICA was founded in 1991 and employs approximately 500 officials, a third of whom serve in one of the agency’s 46 country offices. Its “global strategy is predominantly bilateral” (Kalinowski and Cho 2012: 243) and characterised by Korean ODA being “integrated into high-level resource diplomacy as an effective political vehicle to smooth Korea’s overseas resource development projects in selected developing countries” (Kalinowski and Cho 2012: 249). For most of KOICA’s history, this approach has resulted in a “focus on state-led and largescale projects and the emphasis on construction” (Watson 2012: 92). 799 How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? AComparative Analysis of… Founded in 1968, Norad is the smallest of the three organisations in terms of staffnumbers. Its 250 officials constitute a “management apparatus for Norwegian development aid and southern policies” (Tvedt 2007: 631) concentrated at HQ in Oslo and working on thematic portfolios. In addition to advising the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and directly supervising multilateral contracts with international organisations and partner countries, Norad also plays a leading role in channelling and overseeing public funding in support of Norway’s “strategic communication regime” (Tvedt 2007: 620) on international development cooperation. All interviewees in the three organisations received confidentiality assurances and provided their informed consent in writing. Inspired by an exploratory paper (Yanguas 2021), our semi-structured questionnaire consisted of five questions prompting informants to articulate linkages between the concepts of knowledge management, OL, and development effectiveness on the basis concrete practical examples drawn from their own professional experience. Most interviews lasted around 75 minutes, amounting to nearly 120 hours in total. Both authors produced individual transcripts of each interview. These data were subsequently anonymised and depersonalised. A team of research assistants adjudicated and consolidated all anonymised transcripts. Interviewee identifiers (e.g. BMZ 3, Norad 25) were assigned randomly and nonchronologically. Thequotes in this paper thus stem from cross-validated data and comply with ethical requirements for expert interviews. We structured the interview data in ATLAS.ti using a coding architecture informed by our theoretical framework, with child codes accounting for agencyspecific characteristics. Our qualitative analysis tested the framework’s validity. It proceeded in two steps. The first step focused on each of the three agencies, seeking to ascertain the extent to which OL is conditioned by the three variables: (1) individual knowledge acquisition, (2) social practices and (3) organisational political embeddedness. The second step compared these organisation-specific configurations to gain insight into how the three variables interactively determine the intensity of OL in each case. Agency‑Specific Findings BMZ Without being prompted, 18 out of 31 interviewees at BMZ mention that the German ministry is constituted by generalists who rotate between positions, duty stations and responsibilities every two to three years. Two interviewees even quip that BMZ relies on “universalist dilettantes with broad general knowledge” (BMZ 7; also 9). In such an environment, “organisational learning is not possible without individual learning” (BMZ 7; also 19, 22) since “you learn most on the basis of your own experiences and less on the basis of other people’s experiences” (BMZ 25; also 12, 19, 26). Consequently, formal trainings are considered central (BMZ 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13) as they are expected to “produce” OL by equipping individuals with “collective knowledge that is outward facing” (BMZ 25). In addition, formal training is appreciated for imparting a range of skills, from “the correct procedure to file a request” 806 H.Janus, D.E.Esser period of shared reflection was politically mandated and of limited duration, social practices at Norad have institutionalised negotiation around organisational objectives as a professional routine. And while in the case of KOICA, micro-level agency driving individual knowledge acquisition occurs despite organisational rigidities, such initiative-taking at Norad is aided by flat hierarchies and shared commitment to evidence-based decision-making. Comparative Findings All three cases confirm individual knowledge acquisition as a necessary variable for OL but also highlight its insufficiency. Individual knowledge does not translate cumulatively into OL. Several examples of effective individual entrepreneurialism notwithstanding, our data from two “Weberian” bureaucracies, Germany and Korea, corroborate a well-known structural limitation: for individuals to induce organisational change, they either need to occupy “a position of considerable influence” or “act as a ‘change agent’ and catalyse organisational learning from a junior position” (Johnson and Thomas 2007: 46), accepting that such actions can jeopardise one’s career advancement. Crucially, different career paths and professional identities emerge as indirect but powerful determinants of OL within the individual dimension of our theoretical framework. Whereas some staff at BMZ may join the ministry as development professionals, others are could be attracted by civil service benefits. According to our data, compliance with short-term political priorities constitutes an overriding duty at BMZ. The typical career path at KOICA, too, is predicated on a generalist profile; specialists have less job security and limited prospects for promotion. In contrast to BMZ, however, generalists at KOICA are more likely to be promoted based on cumulative substantive expertise. At Norad, career paths are curiously non-linear; several interviewees describe moving between leadership and desk positions based on personal preferences, personal circumstances, and changing organisational needs. As a result, substantive expertise at Norad appears to be widespread and not correlated to any seniority level or professional profile. Differently structured careers and individual professional identities produce interaction effects with our second variable, social practices, by facilitating group convergence on organisational objectives. The latter is more likelyto occur in organisations where social practices conducive to OL are normalised. This insight is best exemplified by collective reckoning with failure and conforms earlier research on OL by Ron etal. (2006) stressing the importance of balancing unbiased review and frank judgement. It also echoes Brown and Duguid’s (1991: 53) precondition for OL to avoid any “restrictive influence of the existing canonical view”. Our theoretical framework helps conceive of OL not as a discrete, measurable output but as an emergent organisational quality. Our empirical findings illustrate that openended reflection on mistakes can be a typical indicator of vibrant OL in foreign aid agencies. At Norad, frank conversations about failed projects and programmes are routine. In contrast, interviewees at KOICA and BMZ rarely if evermention instances when 807 How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? AComparative Analysis of… failure was appraised collectively and openly. If such reviews occur, then they form part of hierarchically mandated reforms. Importantly, individuals in both organisations recognise such efforts as time-intensive but conducive to OL. However, the “Weberian” features of Germany’s and Korea’s bureaucracies seem detrimental in this context as rule compliance and avoidance of accountability amid a “blame culture” (Catino and Patriotta 2013: 438) are prioritised over perspective-taking and constructive dissent, which are more likely to occur in “liberal” administrative settings such as Norway’s (Dahlström and Lapuente 2022: 56–57). Even though our empirics confirm the analytical value of differentiating between “Weberian” and “liberal” bureaucracies, our research demonstrates that a dichotomous reading of our data would be misguided. None of the three agencies exhibits “church-like dynamics producing ‘official branded knowledge’” (Ellerman 1999), while all cases show that OL is precisely not characterised by neatly delineated “cycles of action and reflection” (Johnson and Thomas 2007: 41). Rather, OL is conditioned by heterogeneous and ubiquitous social practices within each organisation. Similarly, our research confirms that organisational size per se does not condition differences in OL (Walker etal. 2024). Instead, our data contain evidence of managerially mandated organisational reform deemed effective for OL in the largest as well as in the smallest bureaucracy in our sample. Likewise, individual initiative fostering OL is evident across the three organisations but conditioned differently due to variation in social practices and organisational political embeddedness, as illustrated by our theoretical framework. Corroborating research by Barette et al. (2012), our third variable, political embeddedness, holds further explanatory power. Especially politicisation of organisational objectives impedes OL, andnone of the three agencies are seen to be learning because of such politicisation. Rather, they learn despite and through politics. Although political embeddedness acts primarily as a constraint to OL, it also shapes OL processes as a function of organisational norms. At BMZ, short-termism amid frequently changing ministerial priorities is accepted as a fundamental condition. We detect a comparable dynamic at KOICA where staff members feel wedged between ministerial hierarchies and beholden to contributing to the agency’s score in the annual performance assessment as the ultimate measure of success. In both cases, OL occurs only when it is either initiated hierarchically or when individuals take on personal risks. In contrast, numerous interviewees at Norad provide evidence of ‘learning through politics’ by critically engaging with politicisation and pushing back against it. This organisational consensus stems from social practices at Norad that facilitate staff convergence on the view that the agency’s ultimate objective is to achieve development effectiveness, which requires evidence-based programming fostered by open-ended discussions about what works and what does not. Conclusion We have applied a novel theoretical framework to an original dataset comprising interviews with nearly one hundred randomly selected bureaucrats in three OECD DAC member states to explain OL in the foreign aid sector. Our research objectives 808 H.Janus, D.E.Esser have been, first, to validate the framework’s variables and, second, to reveal how interactions between individual knowledge acquisition, social practices, and organisational political embeddedness affect OL in the three organisations. Our comparative analysis confirms that agency-specific interactions between these three variables account for varying intensities of OL across the three organisations, with social practices playing a pivotal role in OL in, and possibly also beyond, foreign aid. All our cases contain evidence of individual learning and awareness of organisational political embeddedness; however, we observe distinct social practices in the three organisations. Norad—the agency where OL is most prevalent—is the only case in our sample exhibiting social practices directly conducive to OL. These practices comprise unsanctioned negotiations of organisational objectives among staff and a consensus to prioritise evidence and terminate failed projects despite political pressures to spend more, faster. Social practices cannot be engineered. For instance, the effectiveness of technical platforms to enhance knowledge management—a typical managerialist ‘best practice’—depends on their integration into organisational routines. In contrast, vignettes from KOICA and Norad provide tangible illustrations of OL in the process of discontinuation of ineffective projects and evidence-based allocation of public funds. Our analysis suggests that organisational leaders can encouragecollective reflection on organisational rigidities and even failures, but this only results in OL when it catalyses shared commitment to organisational change among staff who withstand political headwinds. Those seeking to facilitate OL in foreign aid agencies therefore need to eschew references to vacuous‘best practices’ and instead create social space for unsanctioned negotiations that allow for collective learning how to do less, better. Our findings have several implications for research on OL in bothnational and international bureaucracies. In the theoretical realm, our research demonstrates the potential of studying OL empirically through theory that connects previously disjointed scholarly literatures. Although each of the three variables derived from previous analyses of OL explains certain aspects of OL, they are neither additive nor sequential; only a focus on their interactions renders deeper comprehension of varying intensities of OL. We have thus shown that our novel framework is appropriate to capture agency-specific OL dynamics in the foreign aid sector. On this evidentiary basis, we are confident that our approachcan be applied more widely. Resulting research should be wary of interpreting organisations bluntly in ‘cultural’ terms. Our cases indicate that we need to conceive of organisationalcultures more granually as conglomerations of social practices (Cicmil and Gaggiotti 2014) that co-determine, but are also conditioned by, individual knowledge acquisition and political embeddeness. We are keen to seeour analytical approach to stuying OL being extended beyond the OECD DAC, as well as beyond international development administration. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank all interviewees who participated in this research for their time and candour and appreciate helpful comments by EJDR editor Fiona Yap and two anonymous reviewers. Valuable feedback was also provided during a workshop on “Organisational Perspectives on Development Effectiveness: Comparing Aid Agencies’ Bureaucratic Politics and Practices” held in Paris in November 2023, especially by Paul Clements, Nilima Gulrajani, Dan Honig, David Hulme, 809 How Do Foreign Aid Agencies Learn? AComparative Analysis of… Jenny Iao-Jörgensen, Molly Sundberg and Pablo Yanguas. The 2024 ECPR General Conference panel on “Consequences and Cures of Bureaucratic Overburdening” at University College Dublin and a workshop hosted by the University of Pittsburghs Center for Goverance and Markets in June 2025 provided similarly constructive opportunities to discuss this research.In addition, Niels Keijzer, Davide Nicolini, Andreas Rasche and Mark Theisen shared feedback, insights and references. Georgia Calimeres, Marcel Dreibholz, Elias Koch, Nawshin Tabassum and Alessandra Tangianu assisted with background research and editing. Moira Davidson-Seger proofread the manuscript. Both authors contributed equally and share responsibility for remaining errors. Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) is gratefully acknowledged. Data availability The data used in this research are confidential. Declarations Conflict of interests On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. 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