Implementing adaptive management: A front-line effort Is there an emerging practice? - Teskey and Lavinia (2019)

This paper provides guidance from Abt Associates on how to manage programming more reflectively and elastically. It proposes 15 tools for donors, implementors, and front-line staff to apply adaptive management in practice, at critical stages of the project cycle and within the dominant aid paradigm. This is what they call PILLAR: politically informed, locally led, and adaptive responses. The paper frames PILLAR to cover the full project cycle (design, implementation, and review), hence the nomenclature of an ‘end to end’ approach. The hope is that these tools will eventually replace the current planned, log-frame driven and top-down approach to aid design and delivery which dominates the development sector.