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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...

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...

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...

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...

Doing development differently rests on deliberate efforts to reflect and learn, not just about what programmes are doing and achieving, but about how they are working. This is particularly important for an action research programme like Child Labour: Action- Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA), which is implemented by a consortium of organisations from across the research and development spectrum, during a rapidly changing global pandemic. Harnessing the potential...

This guide is a basic reference on systems thinking and practice tailored to the context and needs of the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). It is an output of the FCDO Knowledge for Development Programme (K4D), which facilitated a Learning Journey on Systems Thinking and Practice with FCDO staff during 2021 and 2022. The guide offers a common language and shared framing of systems thinking for FCDO and its partners. It explores what this implies for...

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...

This document is a an Introductory Toolkit for for civil servants. It is one component of a suite of documents that aims to act as a springboard into systems thinking for civil servants unfamiliar with this approach. These documents introduce a small sample of systems thinking concepts and tools, chosen due to their accessibility and alignment to civil service policy development, but which is by no means comprehensive. They are intended to act as a first step towards using systems thinking...

This learning paper highlights how elements of outcome mapping were used by Save the Children Sweden in a project (2018-2020) that supports adolescents, affected by the Syria crisis, to become more resilient. The paper first outlines how the spheres of influence framework has been applied to develop an actor focused theory of change. It then describes how progress markers, as an alternative to SMART indicators, were formulated to monitor the programme’s results. The paper also outlines how...

- 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...

Essential points for practitioners and donors • Mediation offers a cost-effective and proven method for resolving armed conflict. Between 1985 and 2015, 75 per cent of armed conflicts in the world were resolved through agreement rather than by force. In most cases these processes will have involved third party facilitation or support. • Professional mediators understand the high stakes involved in their work to prevent, mitigate and resolve armed conflict. In addition, they and their...

Development cooperation has spent decades wrangling over the merits, evidence, and implications of what we may term “the learning hypothesis”: the idea that increased knowledge by development organisations must logically lead to increased effectiveness in the performance of their development activities. Organisations of all stripes have built research and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) departments, adopted a multitude of knowledge management systems and tools, and tinkered with...

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...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shifted the context in which aid and development is being delivered. The global scale of the pandemic and the speed at which it is spreading mean that the ‘normal’ economic, ideological and organisational influences which shape (if not determine) aid delivery are in flux. This means that – for a relatively short-period – there is scope for aid actors to work collectively to embed more locally-led, politically-informed and adaptive forms of MERL in aid...

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...

- 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...

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...

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...