Celebrating Adaptive Delivery: A View from the Frontline in Myanmar

Abstract

The conversation on adaptive management has grown fast amongst development actors. These conversations often focus on designing, commissioning, and managing large-scale development programmes. Exactly how this impacts the frontline, the implementers, and day-to-day project delivery is still being debated. Yet, perspectives drawn directly from practice are often largely missing within these debates. This paper is written by two development practitioners. Through this paper, we reflect on the difference between adaptive management and adaptive delivery, and how this interacts with risk and aid accountability, particularly in contexts of fragility.

Bridging Learning and Action: How Did CLARISSA’s Participatory Adaptive Management Approach Foster Innovation, Effectiveness, and Stakeholder Empowerment?

“…The analytical framework on key adaptive management, which provided the basis for the evaluation's theory of change (shown in Figure 5) (Prieto Martín et al 2020) supported our initial analysis too, helping us to navigate the links between evidence-generation, action learning, programmatic improvement, and impact. The evaluation also considered ideas on enabling factors for adaptive management and core adaptive capabilities from the literature (Barnes and Lonsdale 2023;Apgar et al 2022;Gray and Carl 2022) and generally drew upon a broad spectrum of recent adaptive management literature, integrating overarching themes and insights from across the field to inform our analysis.…”

“…The adaptive management literature frequently presents the tension between traditional and adaptive programming approaches as a dichotomy, recommending that either of the approaches is adopted depending on the programme's aims, degree of uncertainty, the complexity of its implementation context, etc. (Barnes and Lonsdale 2023;Byom et al 2020). It is, however, more realistic to see this tension as a duality, where elements from the rigid-flexible-adaptive continuum get combined.…”

“…Although the adaptive management literature often emphasises the importance of responding to external and operational challenges through constant monitoring of the programme's context and assessing the effectiveness of strategies and actions (see, for example, Serpe, Ingram and Byom 2022;Ross et al 2021;Teskey and Tyrrel 2021;Byom et al 2020;Desai et al 2018), it tends to overlook the importance and complexity of the relational dynamics within and across the partnership and intervention contexts. Recent articles have identified these dynamics as critical and recognise that the aid industry's operational model, with heavy reliance on 'consortiums' of disparate organisations, significantly limits the adaptive capacity of development programmes (Barnes and Lonsdale 2023;DT Global 2022;Bridges and Woolcock 2019). However, they stop short of calling for dedicated monitoring and explicit management of these relational dynamics to complement those proposed for the external and operational domains (Snijder et al 2023b).…”

“…It would be tempting to conclude, as frequently hinted by the adaptive management literature, that the deeper forms of learning correspond to the leadership ranks within development programmes, while local delivery teams should focus on the operational, single-loop learning, optimising how to do things rather than questioning which things are done, or why (Barnes and Lonsdale 2023).…”