Evaluating the progress made in climate change adaptation using indicators of resilience, Part V: The way forward for resilience in M&E systems

Part 5: Concluding Remarks & Way Forward: Resilience in programme/project M&E systems and log-frames

One of the key questions for development and adaptation programmes is how to define and measure outputs outcomes and impacts, and how these fit with a programmes logical framework and theory of change. To answer this question it is sensible to start with the ultimate purpose of a programme, as defined through its intended impacts.

Any intervention that explicitly seeks to improve human wellbeing, for example in terms of better health or nutrition, or reduced poverty, will almost certainly define such improvements at the impact level.

This is true of programmes with an explicit focus on resilience to climate change, such as DFID’s BRACED programme. However, demonstrating improved wellbeing in the face of intensified climate shocks and stresses will require either comparison between individual shocks, or an analysis of long-term trends in wellbeing indicators that is somehow contextualised or calibrated using climate data.

While well-being indicators might be defined at the impact level for many interventions, using them to evaluate the intervention’s performance may not be practical, due to the timescales over which they must be measured, and the need to interpret them in the context of climate data.

Many interventions also identify ‘improved resilience’ as a long-term impact. However, improved resilience is not an end in itself, but a means of ensuring that people and systems are able to withstand climate stresses and shocks so that they can sustain – and hopefully improve – their wellbeing.

Put another way, improved resilience should lead to improved wellbeing. Resilience therefore sits further back in the logical chain in an intervention’s theory of change.

In addition, changes in the capacities and characteristics of a population or system that affect its resilience can, at least in principle, be measured over relatively short timescales. In the context of a specific intervention, changes in these capacities and characteristics should result from the intervention’s outputs over timescales that are comparable to the intervention lifetime.

For these reasons, there is a case to be made for defining ‘improved resilience’ at the outcome level in the theories of change and logical frameworks of at least some interventions. This approach has been adopted by DFID's BRACED programme, and currently seems likely to be emulated in future DFID programming.

Is the future resilient?

Provided they are grounded in sound understandings of local contexts and informed by participatory methods, assessments of resilience have huge potential as tools for evaluating the effectiveness of development and adaptation interventions. However, such assessments will require significant additional commitment and resources from donors.

In the longer term, the parallel monitoring of resilience and wellbeing might be a key component in national systems for tracking how well countries are responding to climate change.

Where wellbeing and resilience indicators are tracked over sufficiently long periods (e.g. using augmented national databases), the former might be used to validate the latter – if resilience indicators are any good, they should ‘predict' where the impacts of climate stresses and shocks will be greatest, at least for comparable populations exposed to the same climate hazards. This approach is being piloted in Cambodia, in a collaboration between the Cambodian government and IIED, using techniques developed under the TAMD framework.[1] 

If we are to understand whether or not spending on adaptation is effective, we need to confront the challenges of adaptation M&E.

Ideally, this will involve establishing systems for the parallel, long-term monitoring of resilience (i.e. capacities to anticipate, plan for, avoid, cope with, recover from and adapt to evolving climate hazards), human and ecological wellbeing (e.g. health, economic wellbeing, levels of climate-related losses, ecosystem functioning, etc.), and key climate variables (to provide context for the understanding of trends in wellbeing). For individual interventions, the tracking of changes in the factors or ‘capacities’ that make people and systems resilient may be the most meaningful way of measuring success in the shorter term.

There are risks associated with a focus on resilience, particularly if it promotes ‘incremental’ approaches to building the resilience of existing systems that may not be viable under future climatic conditions (indeed, this appears to be the default approach to adaptation at present). Here, more ‘transformational’ approaches will be required, that seek to replace existing systems or practices with novel ones more suited to emerging or future conditions.

Nonetheless, one thing is certain – if we are to make societies truly more resilient, deliver meaningful adaptation and understand what works, we need to move beyond the current short-term focus on spending and outputs, and think more creatively about what successful adaptation to climate change actually looks like.

[1] This work will be described in a forthcoming IIED Working Paper by Rai et al., available via the IIED website (www.iied.org). See also Rai, N. 2014. Developing a national framework to track adaptation and measure development in Cambodia. IIED Briefing, IIED. (available to download at: http://pubs.iied.org/17259IIED)

This blog is in 5 parts:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V