Rigorous adaptive management: re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or navigating us to safety?
Despite the increased recognition of projects (often retrospectively) labelled as working adaptively, not everyone in the development community is convinced that the sector as a whole should embrace adaptive management and there is worry in some quarters that adaptive management is a fad that will come and go.
One major concern among adaptive management skeptics is that adaptive decisions tend to go undocumented, leaving no trail of why and how decisions were made or what evidence was utilised. Thus, it is difficult for observers to ascertain whether decisions taken are based on solid evidence or on a whim.
With this issue comes a number of related concerns for those interested in doing development differently: adaptation processes are only visible to those directly involved; decisions can appear to be subjective and are not opened to scrutiny; lessons on effective ways of navigating complexity and how to be adaptive are not captured and shared; and some may see adaptive management as an excuse for development actors to make things up things up as they go along.
Adaptive rigour or ‘rigorous adaptive management’ is a new concept developed by the Global Learning for Adaptive Management (GLAM) initiative that tries to overcome these challenges through the introduction of a documented, transparent trail of intentions, decisions and actions into the adaptive management process.
It means decisions that are based on continuously collected evidence throughout all phases of the programme cycle and that have ‘MEL mechanisms that support rigorous evaluative thinking and collective decision-making, and [have] the scope to change what is being measured and evaluated when and if needed.’ It occurs when aid organisations provide their staff with the enabling conditions to actively sense and respond to triggers on an ongoing basis (see Figure 1). More about the concept can be found in a recent blog and brief.
What do people think of ‘rigorous adaptive management’?
Ben Ramalingam — co-director of GLAM and co-author of the brief — presented the adaptive rigour concept at a workshop in Washington DC on 22nd May, to a distinguished panel and participants from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the wider international development community. In the rest of this blog, we share some of the main themes from this discussion:
Melissa Patsalides from USAID’s Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL) shared her experiences of USAID’s attempts to institutionalize adaptive management into the organisation. USAID staff now have explicit permission to work adaptively and are encouraged to do so by default. Yet practice still lags behind policy. Adaptive management is still new and uncomfortable for the majority of staff. Significant efforts have been made to provide staff with guidance, but other barriers still remain to get staff on board to work adaptively. USAID staff are increasingly asking how Adaptive Management can be done in a way that is credible, transparent and ensures accountability. One participants argued that, because it overcomes some of these challenges, ‘adaptive rigour holds promise in making adaptive management palatable for the aid machine’. They also noted that, while adaptive decisions need to be better documented, staff are already over-stretched. Monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) efforts linked to adaptive rigorous management therefore need to be light-touch so as not to add extra burden on staff.
Alison Evans, Director-General of the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) at the World Bank, noted that the concept of adaptive management is still fairly ‘niche’ in the World Bank. She highlighted a challenge facing any large bureaucracy is the need to balance monitoring and evaluation as a critical pillar in institutional accountability, and creating sufficient space for learning and adaptation based on real world situations. Too often M&E ends up being treated as a compliance step at the cost of feedback and learning. What can happen is that the institutional pressure to generate good project outcomes gets translated into project designs that offer first best solutions for what are often third best conditions. A more adaptive lens, using rigorous but light touch monitoring and feedback could help operational staff and implementing agencies to find alternative but more feasible approaches. At the same time, while this approach can achieve unpredicted success it can also run the risk of failing to ‘cross the line’ in institutional terms because the adaptation itself goes undocumented. Addressing this requires a cultural shift from M&E being seen as a tool for compliance to one in which M&E supports accountability through learning.
World renowned evaluation expert Michael Quinn Patton highlighted a danger that efforts of adaptive management reinforce a project and programme mindset that tackle ‘micro-problems’ while ignoring bigger imminent threats, like the large scale challenge to aid industries and development posed by the global climate emergency. He argued that ‘adaptive’ development programmes and projects can risk tackling isolated symptoms rather than the overarching problems that create them and limit more transformative change, akin to simply ‘re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’.
Discussions following these interventions were lively. Some countered Michael’s rebuttal with the suggestion that systematising MEL within adaptive management at different levels (the intervention, projects, programmes, portfolio, and across organisations) would improve development practice and equip it with more ‘systems thinking’ and complexity aware tools that may allow us to better ‘steer the ship’ to safety. Others asked whether aid bureaucracies are even capable of tackling such issues irrespective of the tools used, and wondered if introducing adaptive management and adaptive rigour into aid bureaucracies was only applying a plaster to treat the symptoms of a broken system.
As with any good workshop, the feedback from our panelists and participants left us with as many questions as they answered. Over the coming three years GLAM will seek to provide ideas on how to tackle these, and similar, challenges.
How can adaptive management be more systematic while at the same time ensuring staff are not overburdened? How do we get big aid bureaucracies to shift from a culture of using evaluation for compliance to one of using a more diverse set of continuous MEL tools to learn and improve? Is rigorous adaptive management a useful tool in tackling complex global systemic challenges and what are its limits?
Let us know what you think by commenting below.
Author: Kevin Hernandez, Research Officer, the Institute of Development Studies.
