Adapt

Evaluate and Adapt
Adapt

Purpose

Ensure that strategies and workplans adapt based on results of monitoring and evaluation, unintended consequences, new opportunities, and other changes in conditions.
Share lessons learned via relevant pathways.

Products

Affirmation or revision of workplan and theory of change
Annual report that explains progress to date and captures lessons learned

If your evaluation reveals that your strategy is not on track — or even if it is on track, but circumstances have changed — you may need to adapt your strategy and workplan.

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Review the Situation Analysis.
Conduct a review annually, and look for:
- New challenges: Have new challenges to people and nature emerged? These should be added to the Situation Analysis.
- Changes in enabling conditions: Ask whether there have been substantive changes that would affect the enabling conditions or the potential impact of the strategy; if there have been substantive changes, consider re-initiating a Situation Analysis and the conservation planning process.
Tools You Can Use

Toolkit for using data to learn and adapt

This Strategic Learning toolkit from Spark Policy Institute offers ways to capitalize on data and make time for opportunities to both learn and adapt strategies in response to changing environments or new information.

Consider changes in partner capacity.

Partner capacity is often an important enabling condition. You can use an Institutional Self-Assessment (ISA) to assess organizational capacity. Conservancy staff will find the ISA and related tools on CONNECT, here. The Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness Program also provides a number of resources for evaluating capacity.

External Resources

Conservation Partnership Center

“Working with others” is a central tenet of conservation practice today. This site provides guidance, tools, best practices and other resources to help you and your organization enter into and maintain healthy, effective and productive partnerships.

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Identify and evaluate new opportunities.

Have changes in policies, politics, technology, threats, natural resources, or other drivers occurred that present new opportunities for conservation? If these changes present opportunities for a more affordable, reliable or complete solution to conservation challenges, re-initiate the Situation Analysis and the conservation planning process to evaluate.

Review progress against stated outcomes.

Use monitoring and evaluation results in comparison with intermediate results to ask whether the current set of strategies and tactics are being effective, and whether current allocations to them are appropriate.
Revise theory of change and/or workplan.

Ask if the current Theory of Change is still credible and compelling, and whether the current workplan represents the highest and best allocation of resources to achieve the desired outcome.
Share lessons learned.

Capturing and sharing evidence and knowledge is never more important than when strategies and results are assessed through evaluation, and adaptive changes are made. The process you have just gone through, of reviewing your progress and adapting your strategy, has been rich with new evidence, insights, and learning. This is one of the most important steps at which to consolidate, document, and share what you have learned. Follow the steps laid out in Phase 1, Identify Challenges and Goals, Step 4, Share Advances in Knowledge through Relevant Pathways, (link), to ensure that you are contributing your new evidence to the evidence base and sharing your knowledge with others who will benefit.

Any changes in strategy or implementation approach are worth sharing.

Any change in internal or external conditions that necessitates a change in strategy or implementation, and that may represent a milestone in adaptive implementation, should be memorialized so others may be able to benefit from the thinking behind that change.

Minimum Standard Questions

Have you reviewed the results of monitoring, analyzed the data, and drawn conclusions about impacts and implications?
If anticipated progress is not being made, was workplan, or staffing capacity, or theory of change revised?
If the strategy currently being implemented is substantively different from what was initially planned, was it re-evaluated to ensure that it will still achieve goals, will incur acceptable risks and is supported by evidence?
Has the information been shared with stakeholders in a format appropriate to the particular audience?

Adapt

Review the Situation Analysis.

Consider changes in partner capacity.

Identify and evaluate new opportunities.

Review progress against stated outcomes.

Revise theory of change and/or workplan.

Share lessons learned.

Any changes in strategy or implementation approach are worth sharing.

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