Page - (000093) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

Sharingfindings along theway is a goodway to foster the inclusive involve- ment of as wide a range of stakeholders as possible in project planning and implementation. Encouraging researchers to get early drafts of findings out to potential users for feedback from early on is oneway to build a learning culture and to encourage open-mindedness. Rigid application of just one specific approachmost likely will not work. Whether it is the adoption of a technology, an M&E methodology, a learning approach or a scientific result, it is often not thewhole package that is attractive to users but specific pieces.Weneed to allowusers to cherry pickwhile ensuring that the relevant linkages remain intact so that thecontext isnot lost forotherswho maywant other cherries. Solutions that are good enough rather than optimal. In many domains of knowledge and practice there is no best practice or option, particularly when the problem is complex and resources are constrained. CCAFS made considerable changes once it had started to implement an approach based onTOC and impact pathways, and in timemoved towardsa leaner andsimplermodel.Timewill tell if someof thedetails inevitably lost in thisprocesswill need tobeaddedback in,but the notionof “good enough” systemsneeds to be akeyguidingprinciple. Addressing tensions across scale. CCAFS is still in the process of embedding TOCs for the different organizational units of the program, in order to provide a flexible framework that allows for aggregation of output, outcomes and targets across thedifferentunits.Forexample, targetsneed tobe framedlocallywithusers and beneficiaries, and voiced in such away as to allow theflexibility to dealwith uncertaintyandemergingprioritiesandopportunities.Newinvestmentsof timeand effortmaybeneeded to identifyandworkwithnon-traditionalpartners topromote behavioral change in shared IPs. Providingvalue formoney.Many funding agencies now require that grantees demonstrate value for money. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Zusammenarbeit states that its ‘work is systematically geared towards results, the yardstick by which we measure the success of our work. We want to help achieve tangible positivechangeson theground’ (GIZ2015).Somehavecritiqued thewholenotion of payment by results as applied todevelopment and research-for-development on the basis that it provides perverse incentives that actually diminishes cost- effectiveness (see Chambers 2014). As noted above, there is much work still to doonappropriatemeasurementmechanisms,but thisdoesnotdiminish theneed to demonstrate accountability. Balancing science and outcomes. Research is often curiosity-driven, and tra- ditional indicators of success center on peer-reviewed publications in high-profile academic journals. In today’s highly competitive research environment another crucial successfactor relates tofundraising: theability towriteandwincompetitive research proposals. Neither of these motivations for research is guaranteed to deliver development outcomes. For CGIAR and its research programs, it is still early days, but preliminary results suggest that “successfulRBM” relates to effec- tive and efficient research leading to outcomes, with a minimum of perverse incentives. The building of an IPwith a narrative TOC forces researchers to give 74 T.Schuetz et al.