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What Passages has Learned about Adaptive Management: • Be reflective about information that is collected and create a culture of learning. • Be systematic about establishing monitoring and learning systems. • Be strategic about data sources and analysis, prioritizing areas for learning and addressing issues raised. • Be inclusive about information collection: who is collecting what, how, and how is it being used.

Meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require adapting or redirecting a variety of very complex global and local human systems. It is essential that development scholars and practitioners have tools to understand the dynamics of these systems and the key drivers of their behavior, such as barriers to progress and leverage points for driving sustainable change. System dynamics tools are well suited to address this challenge, but they must first be adapted for...

Evaluation processes that facilitate learning among advocates must be nimble, creative, and meaningful while transcending putative performance and accountability management. This article describes the experience, lessons, and trajectory of one such approach, Simple, Participatory Assessment of Real Change (SPARC), that a transnational HIV prevention research advocacy coalition pilot-tested in sub-Saharan Africa. Inspired by the pioneering work of the outcome harvesting (OH) and participatory...

Abstract Motivation On December 15, 2012 Sombath Somphone was abducted at a police checkpoint in his home city of Vientiane, the capital of Laos; his whereabouts remain unknown. This article considers his work and disappearance through the lens of Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) approaches to development. The article is supportive of TWP, but emphasizes the significant risks of politicized programming in authoritarian contexts. Purpose By examining the case of Sombath Somphone, the...

This case study is an example of a phased transfer of ownership and responsibility from INGO Nuru International to Nuru Kenya, including the exit of all international staff. Post-transition, Nuru Kenya is managed entirely by Kenyan staff, although it continues to receive financial support from Nuru International. A lot of the elements described are aligned with Adaptive Management ways of working.

The world faces converging crises of health, climate, gender and racial injustice and extreme economic inequality. The calls are mounting to ‘build back better’ to create more inclusive, caring and environmentally sustainable futures. But what evidence exists that this is possible? The Inspiring Better Futures case study series investigates whether radical change at scale is possible and how it was achieved. This paper synthesises 18 cases which show that people are already successfully...

A discussion of initial learning emerging from the SLRC ’Adaptive approaches to reducing teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone’ action research project.

Theory of Change is thought to be very useful for learning and adaptive management of complex interventions such as advocacy. Nevertheless, the use of Theory of Change is also under critique. One common criticism is that Theory of Change is often used as a framework that fixes agreements rather than as a living, guiding tool that helps reflection and adaptation. However, while such criticism stresses forms of control, little research has looked at the way Theory of Change and advocacy...

This thesis applies ideational and institutional theories to analyse how two specific ideas, results and adaptation, have changed the theory and practice of development cooperation. The thesis addresses the question of why the results and adaptation ideas are often treated as binaries and how this debate has evolved historically. In a first theoretical paper, the evolution of results and adaptation is conceptualised as a combination of institutional layering and diffusion within development...

when it was reduced to a subsidiary internal service lacking all kind of political attributions. The work done in those years had been formidable, but too many things had passed since, especially the 15M Spanish Indignados Movement, the raise of technopolitics… and the raise of populism and fascism all across Europe. We urgently needed a theoretical framework in which to substantiate our political strategy, so I came up with a Theory of Change of citizen participation (see Figure 1) which...

This briefing note looks at how the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Wildlife Asia programme has operationalised the concepts of adaptive rigour and adaptive management as part of its approach to collaborating, learning and adapting. As described by the Global Learning for Adaptive Management (GLAM) initiative, adaptive rigour is about ensuring that the data, information, methods, processes and systems that underpin adaptive management are robust, systematic and...

In this landmark collection, the voices of pathMakers and innovators in peacebuilding evaluation are assembled to provide new direction for the field.

Adaptive Management involves a dynamic interaction between three elements: delivery, programming and governance. This case study focuses on a large DfID governance project, the Institutions for Inclusive Development (I4ID), a five-year initiative in Tanzania. The study forms part of a research project to examine whether and how adaptive approaches can strengthen aid projects promoting empowerment and accountability in fragile, conflict and violence-affected settings (FCVAS). The research...

How does adaptive implementation work in practice? Drawing on extensive interviews and observations, this paper contrasts the ways in which an adaptive component of a major health care project was implemented in three program and three matched comparison states in Nigeria. The paper examines the bases on which claims and counterclaims about the effectiveness of these approaches were made by different actors, concluding that resolution requires any such claims to be grounded in a...

Transdisciplinarity is not a new science per se, but a new methodology for doing science with society. A particular challenge in doing science with society is the engagement with non-academic actors to enable joint problem formulation, analysis and transformation. How this is achieved differs between contexts. The premise of this paper is that transdisciplinary research (TDR) methodologies designed for developed world contexts cannot merely be replicated and transferred to developing world...

How and to what degree is the World Bank putting its new institutional citizen engagement (CE) commitments into practice? This question guides an independent assessment that the Accountability Research Center (ARC) at American University has undertaken as part of the Institute of Development Studies-led Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme’s investigation into how external actors can best support local processes of and conditions for empowerment and...

Global health donors increasingly embrace international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) as partners, often relying on them to conduct political advocacy in recipient countries, especially in controversial policy domains like reproductive health. Although INGOs are the primary recipients of donor funding, they are expected to work through national affiliates or counterparts to enable ‘locally-led’ change. Using prospective policy analysis and ethnographic evidence, this paper examines...

Research guru John Gaventa summarizes the emerging lessons from a new research programme on 'action for empowerment and accountability' in messy places