The first article of this blogseries introduced the context and importance of adaptive approaches. In the second article we introduced the first three approaches - agile - human centred design - lean startup. In this article we will discuss the final three approaches - thinking and working politically - adaptive management - problem driven iterative adaptation.

Thinking and working politically

Capacity and technical knowledge alone are insufficient to change deeply entrenched political interests and bureaucratic norms (Teskey, 2017: 2).TWP is an approach to development interventions that entails thinking in a more politically aware way – for instance through political economy analysis as an ongoing process or mindset – and working differently as a result, in ways that are tailored to contextual realities and that call for flexibility and adaptation (Rocha Menocal, 2014). While there is no single agreed definition or framework, the TWP Community of Practice (2013) sets out three core principles: ‘Strong political analysis, insight and understanding; a detailed appreciation of, and response to, the local context; and flexibility and adaptability in program design and implementation’.

TWP starts with a recognition that developmental change processes are inherently political, and that development programmes are therefore more likely to be successful when they consider, and have the flexibility to adapt to, local political dynamics (Hogg and Leftwich, 2008). These include the formal and informal ‘rules of the game’, the power and interests of different leaders and groups, and ideas, norms and values. Working politically means that development actors not only tailor interventions to local conditions, but also consider themselves political agents in their own right, and therefore part of the context (Laws and Marquette, 2018).Working politically may include acting in a politically smart way by supporting or facilitating coalitions and working alliances. Because shifting incentives is a complex undertaking that involves altering power relations, development actors need strong processes for understanding, testing and learning, often with a focus on incremental and small-scale reforms at first.

The emphasis is on continual analysis to understand the changing political context and make politically informed decisions, rather than producing a weighty upfront report. This is typified in ‘Everyday political analysis’, a bare bones framework to help frontline staff make politically informed decisions (Hudson et al., 2016). Working politically is often operationalised through adaptive management.

Adaptive management

USAID defines adaptive management as ‘an intentional approach to making decisions and adjustments in response to new information and changes in context’. Adaptive management therefore legitimises changes in tactics and strategy as part of a deliberate approach. While aid programmes using adaptive management should have clear goals, the pathways to those goals are not easily defined ahead of time, meaning that activities and outputs are not specified upfront. Instead, programmes build in deliberate processes of testing, learning and experimentation throughout delivery to discover what will work most effectively. These strategic and tactical reviews allow space to course correct and scale up what works, a process supported by continual and timely evaluation, context monitoring and learning. Adaptive management also emphasises the importance of locally-led problem-solving, meaning that change is led by those within the context rather than being externally driven (Wild et al., 2017). To understand the local context and underlying politics, in practice adaptive management is often supported by processes of TWP.

The principles of adaptive management were articulated by a group of practitioners in the ‘Doing development differently’ manifesto (2014), and have gained currency across the sector since then. Several aid agencies have launched initiatives to integrate adaptive management into the way they work, including LearnAdapt at FCDO, USAID’s Collaborating, Learning and Adapting framework, the Global Delivery Initiative at the World Bank and Global Learning for Adaptive Management, a joint FCDO–USAID initiative.

Problem-driven iterative adaptation

PDIA is an approach to adaptive management, most often used in government reform processes. It shares DNA with almost all of the approaches discussed above, featuring the time-boxed iterations of agile, the ideation phase from design thinking and the political understanding of TWP. It was first tried in Mozambique in 2009 (Andrews et al., 2018). The Building State Capability programme at Harvard has pioneered PDIA, with a number of projects around the world. The team has shared the approach in various formats, including courses on the practice of PDIA, a book (Andrews et al., 2017) and a toolkit (Samji et al., 2018). PDIA is a response to stubbornly low levels of capability of developing country governments and the failure of aid programmes that have attempted to reform these institutions.

When aid programmes transplant ‘best practice’ formal institutions from outside, reforms mimic the appearance of change but have little anchoring in contextual realities and lead to very little change in functions. PDIA begins by defining the problem (rather than starting with an imposed solution), and deconstructing it to get at the root causes, with those leading the reform at the core of the process. Ideas for solutions are often identified within context, rather than importing external ‘best practice’. Multiple potential solutions are then tested in short cycles of action and reflection, which are repeated until the problem is solved.

Common principles of adaptive approaches

1. Acknowledge that the answer is not (and cannot be) known upfront, and that there may not be a single answer.

2. Recognise the importance of the political, social and economic context to understand any given problem or issue.

3. Start with the people you’re building for or working with, and encourage participation and listening.

4. Recognise that understanding a complex system or problem requires interacting with it.

5. Start small, with ‘little bets’ that incur low costs for failure.

6. Be intentional about learning, using research and prototypes to test hypotheses.

7. Measure primarily to learn, rather than to report.

8. Have regular junctures for reflection and learning.

9. Work in loops instead of in a straight line, so that planning, implementation and learning are no longer separate processes.

10. Be pragmatic about process; do what’s needed, not what looks best or is considered ‘best practice

Disrupt Development helps organisations achieve systems change by drawing on succesful adaptive approaches - agile, lean impact, human centred design, adapative management, thinking and working politically and problem-driven iterative adaptation.

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