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Case study about the MUVA programme in Mozambique. (Maybe it "misses the point of AP which is not learning for learning. Is learning for impact. The word impact doesn’t even come up once!") Adaptive Management programming within the Foreign & Commonwealth Development Office demonstrates that the UK Government has examples of optimising for learning within its existing management practice. However, currently, the adaptive management practices are unhelpfully framed by an approach which...

Great things can happen at the frontier of theory and practice. When Feedback Labs worked with USAID’s Global Development Lab to bring together leaders in adaptive management at the White House on June 15th, we were pleased that we were able to move past the ongoing conceptual conversations toward discussing what we could do in concrete terms to implement adaptive management in practice.

SAVI, a DFID funded programme implemented by Palladium, is an adaptive programme putting learning and adaptation at the centre of all decision-making. In relation to management and staffing SAVI has established the following approaches to facilitate this: – An adaptive approach to programme management: Full time strategic technical leadership, that works closely with and complements...

Recognising that aid and development programming takes place in complex contexts, Mercy Corps is increasingly seeking to understand how best to manage programs which iterate, adapt and respond to the consistently evolving settings in which we work. This brief Practice Paper provides some examples of what adaptive management looks like in practice on the Prospects youth employment program in Liberia. It does not seek to function as a manual or set of guidelines, but simply provides some...

Wagner

DT Global is proud to introduce our new Guidance Note: Practical Introduction to Adaptive Management There is a growing consensus around adaptive management as an effective (even necessary) approach when programs are tackling complex development problems. While there is no standard definition of adaptive management, there is general agreement that such programs need to routinely engage with and respond to program context; constantly test what works in that context; and adjust approaches,...

Aid works better – especially in complex and conflict-affected environments – when there is scope to trial and adapt programme strategies. So argues Amir Allana in Navigating Complexity, a case study of Northern Karamoja's Growth, Health and Governance (GHG) Programme that is adopting an 'adaptive management' approach. This BEAM Exchange webinar invited Amir, Tim Sparkman and Peter Roggekamp to discuss lessons from their work in Uganda and Cambodia. What does adaptive management look like in...

Lessons from the market systems development approach The evaluation focuses on Sida’s management of MSD projects. The projects are applying the MSD approach with an aim to: - contribute to improved MSD programming by Sida through better management practices across the project cycle - generate recommendations on how Sida can create conducive conditions for systems approaches and adaptive programming more generally. The brief assesses Sida’s organisational capacity for adaptive management...

Capacity development, that is “the process whereby people, organisations and society as a whole unleash, strengthen, create, adapt and maintain capacity over time” (OECD 2005) has been a key aim of international aid programs. However, capacity development efforts have not met with resounding success despite approximately 25%, or USD15 billion a year, being spent by donors in recent years on technical assistance1 which has predominantly been aimed at developing capacity. A 1998 review by the...

‘Adaptive management’ is all the rage in international development circles. But to avoid yet another buzzword – we need to learn from the experience of natural resource science.

Calls for more ‘adaptive programming’ have been prominent in international development practice for over a decade. Learning-by-doing is a crucial element of this, but programmes have often found it challenging to become more learning oriented. Establishing some form of reflective practice, against countervailing incentives, is difficult. Incorporating data collection processes that generate useful, timely and practical information to inform these reflections is even more so.This paper...

This briefing note focuses on the remote collection and use of data for adaptive management during the Covid-19 pandemic, setting out key considerations to help practitioners think through a transition from more ‘traditional’ monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) to MEL for adaptive management (MEL4AM) that reflects the unique data collection challenges presented by Covid-19. The brief provides an overview of some key considerations in remote data collection, when this is required, and...

Adaptive management approaches potentially offer us opportunities to deliver high quality results in circumstances where change is complex, including in fragile, unstable or conflict affected places. However, building adaptive programming continues to be a challenge for the sector. For CARE, our Department for International Development -UK Aid funded Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) programming has provided useful learning on how to operationalise adaptive approaches. In this paper we expand...

Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) is an evidence and innovation-generation programme funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), responding to the challenge of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL) in Bangladesh and Nepal. It is a challenge characterised by a poor understanding of its drivers and a lack of evidence on what works to combat it. To handle such fundamental uncertainty, the programme adopts a...

To shift aid culture toward adaptive management, we can: - Stay humble, empathetic, and build skills in facilitation and listening. - Focus on working with more flexible foundations or individual donors. Or, work for more rigid donors and help make their policies more flexible. - Get clearer about goals and processes while finding ways to be less specific and more committed to local leadership about pathways to get to the goal. - Resist looking for a magic adaptive management tool and...

Adaptive management is at the heart of ‘doing development differently’ (Wild et al., 2016). Whether it is here to stay depends on how much it is mainstreamed into existing development programming by donors and implementers alike, especially in planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning (PMEL) cycles. In this report, we find that mainstreaming adaptive management in PMEL involves three strategies: 1. planning for flexibility; 2. developing locally owned monitoring and evaluation (M&E);...

Introduction:The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique is a complex-aware monitoring and evaluation tool, widely recognized for various adaptive management purposes. The documentation of practical examples using the MSC technique for an ongoing monitoring purpose is limited. We aim to fill the current gap by documenting and sharing the experience and lessons learned of The Challenge Initiative (TCI), which is scaling up evidence-based family planning (FP) and adolescent and youth sexual...

First installment of reflections on my US trip. This is on the rise of adaptive management approaches in USAID, and some of the questions it raises

This paper assesses the relevance of adaptive or trial-and-error approaches to the field of governance, peace building and human rights. Tackling the problems of poverty, vulnerability and exclusion that persist in parts of the world that continue to be affected by violence or political insecurity is difficult for several reasons. For one, because of the complexity of the prevailing social, economic and political systems, solutions to chronic problems are far from obvious. One response to...

DT Global is proud to introduce our new Guidance Note: Practical Introduction to Adaptive Management There is a growing consensus around adaptive management as an effective (even necessary) approach when programs are tackling complex development problems. While there is no standard definition of adaptive management, there is general agreement that such programs need to routinely engage with and respond to program context; constantly test what works in that context; and adjust approaches,...