Adaptive programming and management principles focused on learning, experimentation, and evidence-based decision making are gaining traction with donor agencies and implementing partners in international development. Adaptation calls for using learning to inform adjustments during project implementation. This requires information gathering methods that promote reflection, learning, and adaption, beyond reporting on pre-specified data. A focus on adaptation changes traditional thinking about program cycle. It both erases the boundaries between design, implementation, and evaluation and reframes thinking to consider the complexity of development problems and nonlinear change pathways.Supportive management structures and processes are crucial for fostering adaptive management. Implementers and donors are experimenting with how procurement, contracting, work planning, and reporting can be modified to foster adaptive programming. Well-designed monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems can go beyond meeting accountability and reporting requirements to produce data and learning for evidence-based decision making and adaptive management. It is important to continue experimenting and learning to integrate adaptive programming and management into the operational policies and practices of donor agencies, country partners, and implementers. We need to devote ongoing effort to build the evidence base for the contributions of adaptive management to achieving international development results.
Political economy analysis (PEA) has emerged as a valuable approach for assessing context and the local systems where international development actors seek to intervene. PEA approaches and tools have grown and adapted over the last 40 years through innovations by donor agencies and practitioners. Our analysis of nine PEAs reveals the following findings: PEAs can make positive contributions to technical interventions; engaging project staff in PEAs increases the likelihood that they will be open to a thinking and working politically mindset and approach; inclusion of gender equity and social inclusion (GESI) in PEAs helps to uncover and address hidden power dynamics; and explicitly connecting PEA findings to project implementation facilitates adaptive management. Implementation lessons learned include careful consideration of logistics, timing, and team members. Our experience and research suggest applied PEAs provide valuable evidence for strengthening evidence-based, adaptive, international development programming. The findings highlight the promise of PEA as well as the need for ongoing learning and research to address continued challenges.
As the global community works toward the Sustainable Development Goals, closer integration between governance and sectoral interventions offers a promising, yet unproven avenue for improving health service delivery. We interrogate what value an integrated governance approach, intentionally combining governance and sectoral investments in strategic collaboration, adds to health service readiness and delivery using data from a study in Senegal. Our quasi-experimental research design compared treatment and control communes to determine the value added of an integrated governance approach in Senegal compared to health interventions alone. Our analysis shows that integrated governance is associated with improvements in some health service delivery dimensions, specifically, in aspects of health facility access and quality. These findings—that health facilities are more open, with higher quality infrastructure and staff more frequently following correct procedures after integrated governance treatment—suggests a higher level of service readiness. We suggest that capacity building of governance structures and an emphasis on social accountability could explain the added value of integrating governance and health programming. These elements may help overcome a critical bottleneck between citizens and local government often seen with narrower sector or governance-only approaches. We discuss implications for health services in Senegal, international development program design, and further research.
In farming households in Haiti, women's critical role in maize production is underresearched yet vital to the growth of the sector. This article explores factors that may increase women's bargaining power in negotiated decisions about production practices and income use in male‐headed households. We find that women's participation in market activities is positively associated with greater input on decisions related to maize production. However, household economic status is more important for adoption of best practices and has a positive relationship with women's input on income use. Results point to various pathways for engaging women in new market opportunities.
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