Using evaluation for adaptive management

Resources

• Adaptive management project

  While focused especially on international development, this series is relevant to wider areas of public good activity, especially in a time of global pandemic, uncertainty and an increasing need for adaptive management.

• Adapting evaluation in the time of COVID-19 - Part 1: Manage

  This blog series is structured around tasks in the BetterEvaluation Rainbow Framework, with Part 1 being focused on the MANAGE task. The remaining blogs in the series address the DEFINE, FRAME and DESCRIBE tasks.

• Strategy Testing: An Innovative Approach to Monitoring Highly Flexible Aid Programs

  This paper by Debra Ladner describes a new monitoring system developed by The Asia Foundation under the DFAT-TAF Partnership called Strategy Testing, which was developed to track programs that are addressing complex development problems through a highly iterative, adaptive 'searching' approach. Suggested by both Michael Moses and Nicola Giordano.

• The Science in Adaptive Management

  This paper by Matt Ripley and Sabine Jaccard ILO, explores adaptive management's history in natural resource management to learn how adaptive management has moved from paper to practice, extracting a set of 6 principles underpinning its real-world application. The authors reflect on these in relation to their experiences running the Lab, an International Labour Organization (ILO) project using a market systems approach to improve working conditions in developing economies, to see how adaptive management can be used for greater impact.

• GPSA Note 5: Adaptive Learning

  This note is the fifth in the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA)'s six-part series 'Are We Ready for Strategic Social Accountability?' and is a diagnostic of field readiness for adaptive management. This note takes stock of the way a sample of 40 entries from the first two rounds of GPSA applications use learning, monitoring and evaluation to provide immediate feedback to improve the effectiveness of their social accountability interventions. This resource was suggested by Florencia Guerzovich.

• Outcome Evidencing: A Method for Enabling and Evaluating Program Intervention in Complex Systems

  This article was suggested by Boru Douthwaite. It describes the development and use of a rapid evaluation approach to meet program accountability and learning requirements in a research for development program operating in five developing countries.

• Outcome harvesting

  Outcome Harvesting can be a useful approach for adaptive management. Outcome Harvesting is particularly useful when outcomes, and even, inputs, activities and outputs, are not sufficiently specific or measurable at the time of planning an intervention. It is well-suited for evaluation in dynamic, uncertain (i.e., complex) situations.

• Enhancing evaluation use: Insights from internal evaluation units

  This book touches on relevant topics to adaptive management from different national, supranational and international organisations' internal evaluation units. The focus of the book is on expressing the challenges, solutions and lessons in fostering organisational evaluative thinking and learning cultures.

• Putting learning at the centre: Adaptive development programming in practice

  This ODI paper begins by clarifying why and what kind of learning matters for adaptive programming. The paper then turns its focus to how strategies and approaches applied throughout a programme’s conception, design, management and M&E can enable it to continually learn and adapt.

• Thank you to our contributors

  • Gavin Stedman-Bryce
  • Boru Douthwaite
  • John Dalton
  • Michael Moses
  • Donna Loveridge
  • Ricardo Wilson-Grau
  • Florencia Guerzovich
  • Kowsar Gowhari
  • Marlene Laeubli Loud
  • Nicola Giordano
  • Brandi Olson
  • Sonia Chen
  • Riccardo Polastro
  • Ricky Kuswardono
  • Ian Goldman
  • J. Nelson-Weaver