Adapting to Learn and Learning to Adapt

The international development community today is a buzz with blogs, workshops, seminars, and papers on systems thinking, complexity, thinking and working politically, iterative programming and adaptive management. Managers have wrestled with the practical implications of these concepts, and donor agencies have increasingly sought to incorporate them into reforms in their policies, procedures, and programs. This brief outlines key features of adaptive programming and management and provides some examples from the field of what they look like in practice, drawing on RTI International's experience. It also identifies some of the challenges to doing adaptive programming and management, and offers recommendations that can help overcome them.