If we could travel back in time…

...what would we do differently?

Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) Implementing Partners, along with the Knowledge Manager, have spent a year designing and setting up M&E approaches and systems. What is resilience? What does it mean in practice? How do we measure it? These are just some of the questions we had to deal with from the start.

I facilitated a session at the BRACED Annual Learning event on lessons learned in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) practice. I found hearing how people are addressing M&E challenges in a complex programme such as BRACED extremely valuable. From concepts to indicators, baselines, practical steps in rolling out M&E systems and the digitisation of data, there was a lot to discuss.

I asked the group: if you could travel back in time and do it all over again, what would you do differently? Of course, there is always room for improvement. Project-to-programme communication and levels of engagement can always be strengthened.

If we could travel back in time, we should ensure that, in a programme like BRACED which operates in different contexts, there is space for peer-to-peer M&E support, from the design to the implementation phase.

But one of the things that struck me the most in our session was when a participant wondered to what extent we could have answered today’s technical and methodological challenges a year ago.

To me, the uncertainty and complexity attached to building climate resilience is what makes BRACED so interesting and challenging at the same time.

Interesting, because we are constantly learning. There are no definite answers, just a series of known-unknowns. 

Challenging, because as a programme, we are asked not only to answer some of these unknowns, but also to build a solid evidence base of what works and what doesn’t in building climate resilience.

Building climate resilience is a complex process that cuts across scales and sectors, and extends long past project cycles. It is inherently uncertain: we cannot, for example, be sure about the consequences of climate shocks and stressors. As a result, monitoring and evaluating climate resilience programmes is also dynamic -- we aim to monitor and assess a moving “target”, since exposure to climate-related hazards can change throughout the course of the project.

As a group of M&E practitioners, methodologically we may still have more questions than answers. But BRACED gives us the space to share what works, and what doesn’t. We may not be able to travel back in time, but let’s make the most of our work by embracing the uncertainty, complexity and dynamism that are inherent to climate resilience.

See here for the BRACED M&E guidance notes, which introduce the approach and frameworks that BRACED is following. If you’re interested in lessons shared and practical recommendations, watch out for our next blog, BRACED M&E: what have we learned so far?