What we work on
We work on the issues that shape organisations and the lives of the people they affect: how decisions are made, how people are treated, how knowledge is used and how change happens.
These issues often connect. Leadership shapes organisational culture. Decisions about technology affect skills, working relationships and accountability. We consider these connections when helping you understand a situation and decide what to do.
Across the areas below, we offer research and assessment, policy and system design, learning, facilitation and ongoing advice. We shape the support around your context, priorities and what you want to achieve.
Where our work concentrates.
Safeguarding & Protection
Policies, complaint mechanisms, response systems and survivor-centred practice, designed for the conditions where they are hardest to use.
Governance, Risk & Compliance
Governance models, decision-making structures, risk management and compliance arrangements for organisations that have outgrown the structures they started with.
Accountability
Accountability to affected populations, complaints and feedback, transparency, and what an organisation owes the people its work affects.
Organisational Culture, Leadership & Conflict
Culture, leadership practice, working relationships, conflict, repair, and the informal arrangements that shape what actually happens.
Strategy & Organisational Development
Organisational direction, restructuring, growth, organisational design, and strategy that country teams and partners can recognise and use.
Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability & Learning
MEAL systems built to inform decisions rather than only to report upwards, including feminist and power-aware approaches.
Diversity, Inclusion & Gender Justice
Intersectional approaches to diversity, inclusion and gender equality across recruitment, procurement, leadership, decision-making and institutional culture.
Localisation, Decolonisation & Power
Power, knowledge, money, language and decision-making in transnational work - and what shifting them actually requires.
Human Rights, Humanitarian Response & Civic Space
Rights-based work, civic participation, advocacy, organising, and operating as civic space narrows.
Responsible Innovation, AI & Technology
AI and digital tools as organisational decisions with consequences for labour, judgement, accountability and risk.
ESG & Sustainability
Environmental, social and governance commitments approached as decisions about what you fund, buy and build.
Preparedness & Duty of Care
Crisis preparedness, emergency response and duty of care for organisations working in fragile, high-risk and rapidly changing settings.
One thing worth knowing
These are subject areas, not services. You do not commission “safeguarding” - you commission a safeguarding assessment, a safeguarding framework, safeguarding training, a facilitated process after a safeguarding failure, or an adviser through safeguarding implementation.
Each area page shows how the five services apply to it.
Thirteen disciplines, one assessment.
This is not a list of interests. It is why our assessments often identify a cause that a single-discipline review would miss.
We draw on
- Development Studies
- Education & Critical Pedagogy
- Environmental Studies with a Social Justice Lens
- Feminist Theory
- Gender Studies
- History & Intellectual History
- Human Rights Law
- Linguistics & Translation Studies
- Organisational Psychology & Psychosocial Studies
- Peace & Conflict Studies
- Political Science & International Relations
- Postcolonial & Decolonial Studies
- Sociology & Anthropology
Tell us what you’re dealing with.
Most engagements begin with a problem that sits across two or three of these areas at once, and has not yet been fully named. That is the normal starting point, not a complication.
The first conversation is free and carries no obligation.
