Adaptive management is increasingly on the ticket for development programming, and has been crucial in the wake of covid-19. I’ve been working with adaptive programmes for most of my career as DFID has often been pioneering and supportive of it as an approach. However, the question I hear frequently is ‘but what does good look like?’ and so I wanted to take time to reflect on that.

This particular blog post was prompted by a conversation I had with a colleague and friend Ben Kumpf (@bkumpf), Head of Innovation in DFID (then-called if reading after September 2020). We had been discussing enablers of adaptation and he asked me if I had any case studies of tools and methods that worked well… which is what sparked me to say ‘I don’t think I can do that, as I don’t believe those are what meant adaptation worked well’. After some…