Transition Diagnostic

How much of the room are you using?

Twelve questions about one programme. Every question has a box to tick if the answer is fixed by someone other than you. What comes out is two positions on the same plot: where the programme sits inside the room it actually controls, and where it sits in absolute terms. The distance between them is the constraint. Roughly twelve minutes.

This is a thinking tool, not a validated instrument. The weightings are mine and they are arguable. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent anywhere, and refreshing the page clears it.

What It Measures

Two axes, and a constraint flag on every answer.

The first version of this scored programmes down for things they did not control: donor due diligence rules, registration requirements in the jurisdiction, headquarters pay bands. That is the same move I criticise capacity assessment tools for making, so this version takes it out at the structural level rather than apologising for it in a footnote.

Horizontal axis

Theatre to authority transfer

Who holds the contract, the budget discretion, the veto, the donor relationship, the relationships with government. Not who is consulted.

Trust sits here too, as a question rather than a separate dimension. Authority handed to a partner you do not fully trust tends to come back inside a year, and it rarely comes back openly. It comes back as a capacity concern.

Vertical axis

Agency recognition, as a ratio

Not how much agency exists. How much of the available room is recognised and used.

A programme boxed in by donor rules that uses every inch of what it has scores high here. A programme with wide latitude that ignores what its own staff have already worked out scores low. Nothing is marked down for a constraint it does not hold.

A third reading, reported separately: projectification to continuity.

Not how long a programme survives. Whether it was designed with an end date and a closure plan, or as a component of something that carries on without it. An eighteen month emergency response scoring high on continuity is fine and slightly unusual. A twelve year health programme scoring high is the finding, which is why the result reads this against the context you set below rather than against a single standard.

Context

Set this first. The output reads against it.

Answer for one programme rather than for your organisation as a whole.

Programme type

Closest fit. If it started as one and became another, pick what it is now.

Roughly how long it has been running

Including predecessor phases under a different grant number.

What the programme states it is for

In its own words, from the proposal or the strategy document. Optional, and it is only echoed back to you.

The Questions

Pick the closest option, then decide whether it was yours to decide.

None of the options will fit exactly. Pick the nearest and move on. The notes under each question cover where the measure comes from and where I have run into trouble with it.

0 of 12 answered

Result

Two positions, one line.

Authority transfer plotted against agency recognition A solid dot marks the position within the room the programme controls. A hollow dot marks the position in absolute terms. The line between them is the recorded structural constraint. HARNESSING CONSTRAINT TRANSFERRED MANAGED DELIVERY DEVOLVED BURDEN AGENCY RECOGNISED AGENCY INVISIBLE AUTHORITY RETAINED AUTHORITY TRANSFERRED WITHIN THE ROOM YOU CONTROL IN ABSOLUTE TERMS

Position

The constraint

Yours to move
    Recorded as fixed
      Projectification to continuity

      This is a thinking tool. It reads what you tell it.

      A Transition Exposure Review reads your actual documents: grant agreements, partner contracts, the operating model, the risk register. It tells you which of the constraints you have just flagged are real and which are habits.

      Two weeks. Fixed fee. Written findings and a ninety-minute session.

      Book a call Read the 2026 study

      Method

      Fifteen frameworks, and where each one took me.

      The questions above are drawn from these and reweighted. Several of them are better than the tool built on top of them, and I have said so where that is the case.

      1. Grand Bargain localisation workstream (IASC, 2016). Commits signatories to channel 25 per cent of humanitarian funding as directly as possible to local and national responders.It did the hard thing first, which was to put a number on something the sector had only ever discussed as a principle. A number can be missed in public, and it has been. What I keep running into is that it counts arrival rather than conditions. Money can land in a local account with the spending plan already written somewhere else.
      2. IASC Localisation Marker Working Group. Codes funding flows by how many intermediaries sit between donor and local actor.The only serious attempt I know of to make the money question auditable rather than declarative, and counting hops is real measurement. When I tried to apply it to a programme I was managing, one hop with total conditionality scored better than two hops with genuine discretion, and I could not get the marker to say the thing I could see.
      3. Charter for Change (2015). Eight commitments, self-reported annually by INGO signatories.Worth taking seriously as a public statement by organisations who did not have to sign anything. As evidence it is the actor measuring itself. I have written one of these returns, so I know how the sentence gets chosen.
      4. NEAR Network Localisation Performance Measurement Framework (2019). Seven dimensions covering partnership, funding, capacity, coordination, policy influence and participation.The best in this list, and the only one built from a Southern network outward rather than a donor inward. I have borrowed most heavily from the policy influence dimension, which comes closer than anything else to asking whether a local actor can change something rather than receive something. Capacity still travels one way in the framing, and that is the assumption I bump into when I use it.
      5. Start Network, Shifting the Power (2015 to 2017). Measured influence in coordination structures alongside organisational capacity.It identified correctly that a seat at a table is not influence over it. Then it found, as this tool finds, that the difference is far easier to name than to measure.
      6. OECD DAC evaluation criteria, revised 2019. Relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, sustainability.Durable enough that most donor templates are downstream of it, which is reason enough to know it well. Sustainability sits sixth, and in the evaluations I have read and contributed to it gets written last, shortest, with the least evidence behind it. It asks whether benefits continue, which is a different question from whether authority moved.
      7. Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (2014, revised 2024). Nine commitments with third party verification schemes.External verification is a genuine advance and the reason I trust a CHS result more than any self-reported return here. It is built around accountability to affected populations, so it catches consultation failures well. It was not designed to catch a partner who gets consulted properly and still cannot move a budget line.
      8. USAID Local Capacity Strengthening Policy (2022). Reframed capacity as relational rather than a deficit to be filled.Conceptually the strongest US document on this, and now largely of historical interest. Worth reading alongside what happened afterwards, which turned the whole question into a live test nobody designed.
      9. USAID Journey to Self-Reliance country roadmaps (2018 to 2021). Seventeen third party metrics scoring national commitment and capacity.Using third party data rather than self-report was the right instinct and I wish more frameworks did it. It measures countries. A country can move up the roadmap while every clinic inside it stays exactly as dependent as it was.
      10. Gavi eligibility and transition policy. Gross national income thresholds trigger co-financing steps and eventual graduation.The clearest worked example of transition as a schedule, and predictability is undersold by its critics. A partner can plan against a schedule and cannot plan against a mood. The schedule is set by national income, and I have not found the point in it where anyone asks whether the delivery system underneath can absorb the step.
      11. Global Fund sustainability, transition and co-financing policy (2016). Transition readiness assessments before funding steps down.Assessing readiness before withdrawal rather than after is the best single idea in this list and question eleven borrows it wholesale. Where I have watched it strain is services delivered by civil society rather than by the state, where a graduation schedule arrives at an organisation the state has no plan to fund.
      12. WHO health system building blocks (2007). Six blocks: service delivery, workforce, information, medicines, financing, governance.Still the fastest way to work out which part of a system fails first, and I reach for it as a checklist more often than anything else here. Governance is one block of six. In the interviews I have been doing, governance is not a block. It is what decides the state of the other five.
      13. Organisational capacity assessment tools (OCAT, Pact OCA and similar). Domain scoring of partner organisations, usually self-administered with a facilitator.The facilitated version can be a genuinely good conversation, and I have seen partners use the output to win internal arguments they had been losing for years. The scoring measures a partner against a template of a well run INGO and marks down informal process, which is frequently the reason anything works at all. This tool exists partly because of that, which is why there is a flag on every question.
      14. Outcome Harvesting (Wilson-Grau and Britt, 2012). Works backwards from observed change to what plausibly caused it.One of the few methods that can register an unplanned local workaround as an outcome rather than as noise, and questions seven and eight are built on its logic. Labour intensive, which is why it appears in proposals more often than in budgets.
      15. Most Significant Change (Davies and Dart, 2005). Structured collection and selection of participant narratives.Surfaces things no indicator was watching for, which is exactly what you want early. I have also seen it arrive at the end of a process as a box of quotes decorating findings that were settled months earlier. The method did not do that. The timing did.

      Read together, the centre of gravity across all fifteen is funding directness and organisational capacity measured against an external template, mostly assessed before the handover happens. Very little of it asks whether a local actor can say no, and almost none of it separates a constraint the programme chose from one it inherited. That second absence is where the weighting here departs from the field.