Tips on Learning from Context & Tips for Strengthening Local Capacity To Assess Incentives and Conduct Savvy, Adaptive Programming - Jacobstein (2020)

This paper provides USAID’s tips for strengthening local capacity to assess incentives and conduct savvy, adaptive programming. The paper points out that while immediate programming benefits when it is implemented in a way that observes and adjusts to shifts in context - particularly incentive structures and power dynamics - over the long term, effective development programming must empower local actors to implement their own efforts more routinely in similar ways. This can be thought of as developing the capacity of local actors to design and manage context-driven, adaptive programming, or to think and work politically (TWP). This paper is an effort to compile some good practices in supporting local capacity to TWP. It focuses on tips for strengthening skills, changing the locus of learning, and fostering relationships.