6 Adaptive management in practice
Two agencies leading the way with adaptive management are the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Collaborate, Learn and Adapt (CLA) [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] and the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI)’s Global Learning for Adaptive Management initiative (GLAM).
The CLA platform is an initiative funded by USAID with the aim of promoting adaptive management in the development sector globally. Resources are publicly available.
GLAM is an action research project that ran from 2018–22 funded by both the UK and US governments. It is a joint venture between academia, official aid donors and non-governmental organisations as partners.
Now complete the next activity.
Activity 5
Read the following blog post entitled ‘Rigorous adaptive management: re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or navigating us to safety?’ on the GLAM website and answer the following questions. Note your responses in the box below:
- What are the problems with adaptive management?
- How might they be tackled?
Discussion
The blog discusses whether the adaptive management decisions will be effectively documented. Without this, adaptive management may seem an approach that follows whims and is subjective. This problem is tackled by introducing rigorous documentation processes that capture adaptations or changes and record how they respond to data evidence for learning.
Another identified problem is that there are concerns about the amount of time the adaptive management approach asks of already overstretched staff. To tackle this it is suggested that adaptive management monitoring is a light touch.
Adaptive management has emerged as a management approach which is sensitive to the context and seeks to learn and adapt throughout the lifecycle of an intervention. Some call this ‘doing development differently’, or ‘thinking and working politically’.