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In 2016, the Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL) commissioned an internal stocktaking of USAID's mission-based MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning) Platforms.
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Over the last half century, repeated calls for adaptive learning in development suggests two things: many practitioners are working in complex situations that may benefit from flexible approaches, and such approaches can be difficult to apply in practice. • Complexity thinking can offer useful recommendations on how to take advantage of distributed capacities, joint interpretation of problems and learning through experimentation in complex development programmes. • However, these...
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Multi-project programmes can serve different purposes. For instance, they may coordinate multiple implementing entities; standardise management and technical support; compare intervention approaches across different contexts; enhance leverage through joint action; or foster sustainability by building relationships among organisations. • At the same time, multi-project programmes are costly, potentially duplicate other mechanisms that fulfil similar functions, and can dilute focus and create...
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Multiple aid agencies often try to support change in the same places, at the same time, and with similar actors. Surprisingly, their interactions and combined effects are rarely explored. This Policy Briefing describes findings from research conducted on recent aid programmes that overlapped in Mozambique, Nigeria, and Pakistan, and from a webinar with UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) advisors and practitioners. The research found three distinct categories of ‘interaction...
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What can middle-level theory do? Middle-level theory (MLT) has several uses in development planning and evaluation. It helps predict whether a programme can be expected to work in a new setting. It offers insights into what design features are needed for success. It provides invaluable information for monitoring to see if the programme is on track and to fix problems that arise. It reveals the causal processes and related assumptions to be tested in an evaluation and helps identify...
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This paper examines adaptive approaches in aid programming in a fragile, conflict and violence-affected setting (FCVAS), namely Myanmar. A combination of desk review and field research has been used to examine some of the assertions around the ‘adaptive management’ approach, which has arisen in recent years as a response to critiques of overly rigid, pre-designed, blue-print and linear project plans. This paper explores if and how adaptive approaches, including rapid learning and planning...
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Internal and external stakeholders have different information needs over a project’s life, for purposes that include adaptive management, accountability, compliance, reporting and learning. A project’s monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning, or MEAL, system should provide the information needed by these stakeholders at the level of statistical reliability, detail and timing appropriate to inform data use. In emergency contexts where the situation is still fluid, ‘informal...
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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.
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Achieving broad-based socio-economic development requires interventions that bridge disciplines, strategies, and stakeholders. Effective sustained progress requires more than simply an accumulation of sector projects, and poverty reduction, individual wellbeing, community development, and societal advancement do not fall neatly into sectoral categories. However, researchers and practitioners recognize key operational challenges to achieving effective integration that stem from the structures...
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Nearly all challenges in international development tend to be complex because they depend on constantly evolving human behaviour, systems, and contexts, involving multiple actors, entities, and processes. As a result, both the discovery and scaling of innovations to address challenges in development often involve changes in system behaviour or even system-level transformation. This is rarely a linear process over time and can result in unexpected outcomes. Existing evaluation techniques...
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Executive Summary When Christian Aid (CA) Ireland devised its multi-country and multi-year Irish Aid funded Programme Grant II (2017-2022), they opted to move away from a linear programme management approach and to explore an adaptive one. Across seven countries: Angola, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, CA and partner organisations support marginalised communities to realise their rights, reduce violence and address...
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ICAI published this review on DFID’s approach to value for money in February 2018, and as value for money is both a process and an outcome and cuts across all aspects of DFID’s operations, did not score this review. We made five recommendations and published a follow-up to this review in July 2019. All UK government departments are required to achieve value for money in their use of public funds. In recent years, DFID has been working to build value for money considerations further into its...
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The international development community has increasingly embraced the idea that finding durable solutions to complex development problems requires new ways of working that move beyond industry norms. This paper makes an important contribution to the current debate by outlining an innovative monitoring system called Strategy Testing (ST). This is the third paper in the Working Politically in Practice paper series, launched together with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
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- This short paper draws out lessons for working effectively with and through partners, based on the experience of the Institutions for Inclusive Development (I4ID) programme – an adaptive, politically smart governance programme in Tanzania. • Cultivating effective partnerships can be a key part of delivering locally legitimate projects that have the potential to create sustainable change. Adaptive and politically informed ways of working create specific opportunities and challenges for...
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- The United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)’s standard economy, efficiency, effectiveness/cost-effectiveness and equity (4E) framework is still relevant for approaching, measuring and managing value for money (VfM) for adaptive programmes. • However, this framework needs to be reframed to capture and incentivise flexibility, learning and adaptation. • VfM appraisal and reporting should be done in a way that draws on beneficiary feedback and informs good...
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• Donors are increasingly using portfolio-based programmes that embrace ‘good failure’ and adaptive, political programming. • However, measuring the impact of these programmes is challenging, especially for those working on policy influence and building country systems; not only do you need to measure the positive and negative impact of the overall portfolio, but also the different pathways tested. • Programmes, therefore, need a light-touch monitoring and evaluation system that allows...
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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...
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