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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...

Adaptive programmes can be accountable, rigorous and high quality in how they use evidence by taking an ’adaptive rigour’ approach. Core development and humanitarian challenges are complex, and require processes of testing, learning and iteration to find solutions – adaptive management offers one approach for this. Yet large bureaucracies and development organisations can have low tolerance for experimentation and learning, and adaptive management can be viewed as an excuse for ‘making...

The increasing popularity of adaptive programmes in the development sector in the past decade is partly a response to the complex and interconnected challenges facing many developing countries, including the impacts of climate change. The pathway to adapting to climate change is unknown, and there are many deep-rooted institutional, political, economic and social barriers. Adaptive programmes provide the flexibility to allow those delivering the technical assistance to support governments to...

The United Kingdom’s (UK) Department for International Development (DFID) is an ambitious government department that is committed to reducing poverty and conflict overseas. Many of the issues on which DFID works are complex; whether focused on climate change, gender equality, health or other priorities, simple solutions rarely exist. And to tackle these complex challenges, DFID staff must interact with unpredictable systems of political, organisational and individual behaviours and...

Adaptive management – the idea that development projects should respond to real life complexities and be flexible enough to respond to unforeseen changes – is an often-praised approach to doing development differently, with donors and partners exploring how to apply it within their programming.

A DFID programme in Kyrgyzstan offers useful insights into how the Thinking and Working Politically approach can escape from its governance ghetto

This training package includes 7 Training Modules and a set of Annexes (Annexes A-O). The Training Modules build on each other and should ideally be used in a sequenced way in a training setting. However, for groups with specific training needs around particular areas, modules can also be used individually, but need to be tailored by the trainers and facilitators to meet the needs of specific audiences. The annexes provide worksheets and hand-outs that can be used as resources during the training for specific modules and exercises.

Polycentricity is a fundamental concept in commons scholarship that connotes a complex form of governance with multiple centers of semiautonomous decision making. If the decision-making centers take each other into account in competitive and cooperative relationships and have recourse to conflict resolution mechanisms, they may be regarded as a polycentric governance system. In the context of natural resource governance, commons scholars have ascribed a number of advantages to polycentric...

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...

Those working to advance social change in the Pacific must understand, work with and respond to the complex and changing relationships and dynamics of power that exist within such networks, and situate their work in the context of decolonisation and self-determination. But the approaches typically used by NGOs to plan our projects and programs have failed to give due attention to these dynamics. The result is that our projects fall short of achieving their promise, despite being technically...

Evaluative Tools for Improving Campaign Effectiveness Public health campaigns aim to control disease or deliver essential health services and products through time-limited and periodic channels. Many countries use campaigns to augment or replace routine service delivery, to target certain populations, or to accelerate progress towards coverage targets. The Root Cause Analysis and Rapid Evaluation, Action, and Learning toolkits present a systematic but flexible approach to identifying the...

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...

This paper examines adaptive approaches to aid programming in Nigeria. Through field research and desk reviews, we have investigated some of the assertions around the ‘adaptive management and programming’ approach, which has arisen in recent years as a response to critiques of overly rigid, pre-designed, blueprint and linear project plans. This is the second of three case studies in a series which explore if and how adaptive approaches, including rapid learning and planning responses, are...

Healthcare systems are increasingly recognised as complex, in which a range of non-linear and emergent behaviours occur. China’s healthcare system is no exception. The hugeness of China, and the variation in conditions in different jurisdictions present very substantial challenges to reformers, and militate against adopting one-size-fits-all policy solutions. As a consequence, approaches to change management in China have frequently emphasised the importance of sub-national experimentation,...

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...