The main objective of the TRACKS project, is to mobilise knowledge about current climate variability in communities in northeast Bangladesh, how it affects the local people, and how this knowledge can make them better prepared for future changes. As such, this project is not about sustainable management of a specific resource or ecosystem, like many adaptive governance initiatives are. Rather, TRACKS is situated in communities where the social-
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Characteristics Summary description
High diversity Diversity in ecosystems and economy
Variety of stakeholders engaged in processes
Diversity of planning response and recovery activities Effective governance and institutions Legitimate formal and informal structures
Flexible and responsive institutions Enabling learning and experimentations Acceptance of uncertainty and change Systems that engage with and accept change
Flexibility rather than assumed linearity Non-equilibrium system dynamics Dynamism and change
Coping with, adapting to and shaping change Empowered individuals and institutions to deal with disturbance
Community involvement and inclusion of local knowledge
Shared rights and responsibilities for resource management Community engagement ownership, participation
Combined scientific and indigenous/local knowledge Preparedness and planning Timely information, plans embedded in institutions
Redundancy and planning for failure Investment in agency and adaptive capacity High degree of equity Account for equity and justice
Equitable economy and distribution of assets and wealth
“Hard” or technical adaptations may fail to address equity Social capital, values and structures Trust, norms and values
Address multiple values and interests
Learning Essential to cooperate, learn and apply lessons
Iterative programme processes or organisational learning Adoption of cross-scalar perspective Transcend the local scale
Engage with short and long time horisons
Networks across regions, links to community structures Table 6: Ten characteristics of social-ecological resilience (Ensor et al., 2016, adapted from Bahadur et al., 2013)
ecological system is already changing as a consequence of global warming, and the people must build adaptive capacity to cope with the changes. Consequently, parts of the evaluation frameworks proposed for adaptive governance that typically focus on the management of a well-defined resource, has little relevance for the TRACKS project. Other parts, however, provide valuable tools useful for evaluation of a climate change adaptation process. In this section, I will discuss how the evaluation frameworks presented above can be applied in this thesis.
40 2.2.3.1 Drawing on existing frameworks
Adapting to climate change is all about building resilience in a complex world. Adaptive governance offers a set of principles and guidelines on how to achieve this, and most of the proposed frameworks for evaluation use these principles as a starting point. However, as noted by Conley & Moote (2003), “the criteria relevant to a given evaluation will always vary with the reasons for evaluation, the values and perspective of the evaluator, and the context and characteristics of the collaborative effort being evaluated”. In the same vein, Plummer and Armitage (2007) emphasise that mapping out a suite of specific criteria and indicators for evaluation is problematic, because any adaptive governance initiative is highly context-dependent. Connick and Innes (2003) also point out that many evaluation efforts of
collaborative processes miss the mark because they assume that policies can be designed to produce predictable outcomes, even in highly complex settings. This supports an approach that tailors the evaluation criteria to its context. Consequently, instead of solely relying on existing evaluation indicators for adaptive governance, this thesis follows Trimble et al.
(2015)’s initiative to adopt a participatory approach that will allow a tailoring of the
evaluation to its specific context. In addition, it draws on existing evaluation efforts and key principles of adaptive governance, which will be outlined and discussed in Chapter 3.
2.2.3.2 Adopting a participatory evaluation approach
Participatory evaluation goes under many names, some of them being ‘empowerment
evaluation’, ‘fourth generation evaluation’, ‘democratic evaluation’, and ‘pluralist evaluation’
(Pollitt, 1999). Although these approaches may differ from each other, they share some essential, common principles: they agree that it is fundamental to good evaluation practice that major stakeholders participate actively; and they all seek to break with the management-based tradition of evaluation, which sees itself as neutral, and where the evaluator is seen as an independent expert who uses unbiased methods (Plottu & Plottu, 2011). While the goal of traditional management-based evaluation approaches is to produce a value-free evaluation, participatory evaluation approaches are based on the assumption that any human intervention in a process is inherently biased – and that it is impossible for an evaluation process to be neutral and non-politicised. Participatory evaluation aims at bringing together diverse stakeholders in the evaluation process, based on principles of inclusion, dialogue and deliberation (Plottu & Plottu, 2011). According to Cousins and Whitmore (1998), the core premise of participatory evaluation is that the stakeholders’ involvement will improve its relevance, ownership, and hence, utilisation. The conceptualisation of utilisation in this
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regard, has traditionally been in terms of: (i) support for concrete decisions, (ii) an educative or learning function, or (iii) the political or persuasive use of evaluation to further a particular agenda, or to reaffirm decisions that have already been made. Participatory evaluation is supposed to increase the external validity of evaluation because multiple stakeholders are allowed to express a diversity of perspectives and points of view. Getting to be involved in the evaluation also makes it more relevant for the stakeholders, because it addresses their
particular concerns (Plottu & Plottu, 2011).
Trimble et al. (2015) chose a participatory evaluation approach in their study of fisheries governance in Uruguay, and the governance of a marine protected area in Brazil because it fosters social learning, reflexivity and feedback. Agreeing that this is an approach that corresponds well with the principles of adaptive governance, and therefore is worth exploring, participatory evaluation is implemented in this study. How this was done in practice will be outlined in the following chapter.
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