Hi, I am Arnaldo.

I live in Tampere (Finland). I have spent two decades working in middle and low-income countries as a researcher and consultant on poverty reduction, education, and democratic governance. I have lived in Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Living in these countries has put me in touch with different contexts and cultures.

I am the director and co-founder of Capability, a social enterprise dedicated to addressing complex and politically contested problems in poverty reduction, education and democratic governance. We provide research and consulting services using systems thinking, political economy analysis, and the design of monitoring systems that focus on learning and sensemaking for managing adaptive portfolios of actions to address complex problems.

I have worked with organisations funding or implementing international development programmes. These include FCDO/DFID, DFAT, UNDP, GIZ, SIDA, USAID, the World Bank, ADB, IFAD, Swiss Development Cooperation, ODI, Helvetas, Cardno, DAI, BRAC, and Plan International. I am also a research associate at ODI in London and with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad.

I have published extensively on the political economy of evidence use in policy and practice, adaptive development, and monitoring and learning systems with an emphasis on learning systems and portfolio sensemaking with the ODI in academic articles, book chapters, blog posts and opinion pieces. In 2021 I ended a three-year term as an associate educator with the journal Evidence & Policy.

You can find the full list of my publications in the My publication page.

I love photography and share my photos on Photosandwords.

This blog has evolved over the years as I have continued to learn new things through my international work. The ideas in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of any of my current or past employers and clients.