Adaptive Management in Refugee Programming: Lessons from Re:Build

Helen Dempster and Nicol Herbert
Additional contact information
Nicol Herbert: International Rescue Committee

No 295, Policy Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: Humanitarian and development crises are increasingly protracted and complex, lacking clear solutions and paths to reach the most-affected individuals and communities. Those working in such crises must be creative, adaptive, and supported by frameworks that promote efficient and effective responses. Adaptive management is a learning-oriented project management approach that centralizes proactive and ongoing reflection on what is and is not working, adapting the program design or operational delivery based on this new information. This approach is being implemented by a five-year program—Refugees in East Africa: Boosting Urban Innovations for Livelihoods (Re:Build)—aiming to achieve economic self-reliance for urban refugees and other vulnerable residents of Kampala, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya. The evidence for how to best support refugee economic self-reliance is limited; even less is known about what is effective for urban refugees specifically. Re:Build is utilizing adaptive management principles to navigate this uncertainty with the goal of achieving sustained outcomes for clients and more information about what works. While adaptive management offers a range of potential benefits, it requires implementers and donors to operate in new ways. After summarizing the existing adaptive management literature, this paper outlines lessons from the first two years of Re:Build’s attempts to implement an adaptive program. It concludes by sharing practical recommendations, for both implementers and donors, on how to better live out these principles.

Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2023-06-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig, nep-ppm and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/adaptive-managem ... l&utm_campaign=repec

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:ppaper:295

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().