Learning lessons and understanding progress

Monitoring and evaluation are often discussed together as ‘M&E’, as the two processes are complementary. Monitoring provides ongoing information that can be used to check and track progress and can help to inform an evaluation. In contrast, an evaluation is an opportunity to reflect in a more formal way on progress made at key points during validation and/or implementation of adaptation options. Evaluations are often conducted midway through the adaptation process and, most commonly, upon completion of validation or implementation activities.

Both monitoring and evaluation can help in answering two key questions: “Am I doing the right things?” (e.g. is my chosen adaptation option appropriate?) and “Am I doing things right?” (e.g. is this option being implemented appropriately?).

Monitoring and Evaluation

Monitoring is the process of assessing progress made during implementation of adaptation options, through the systematic collection of information (i.e. tracking indicators over time). Monitoring occurs continually through the adaptation process. In practice, it is about asking questions such as:

• How is the work going?
• Are we still on track to meet our overall aim?
• Does anything need to change?

Monitoring is valuable as it enables you to adjust your activities in response to the information you are gathering.

Evaluation is the systematic and objective assessment of the relevance, performance, efficiency, and impact (both expected and unexpected) of adaptation measures in relation to the original objectives of the adaptation process. Unlike monitoring, evaluation usually occurs at a particular point, e.g. midway through or when implementation has been completed.

M&E is important in the c&c approach as it connects Steps 1-4, allowing you to check the progress of activities during the course of implementation and to determine whether they are having (or have had) the impact that you expected.

The M&E process also enables you to check whether your assumptions about how to achieve the objectives of the adaptation process were reasonable. It provides a structure for drawing out and sharing what worked well and what did not, and can help in identifying the factors that influenced these outcomes. Improving the learning process means improving existing activities and designing more effective activities for the future.

M&E in climate change adaptation can be more challenging than other development or agricultural work for a number of reasons, including the following:

• Climate change is an ongoing, long-term process that will unfold over many years. This means there can be significant time lags between the implementation of adaptation options and their measurable impacts. For example, it might take 10 years to find out whether planting trees to shade coffee plants is effective in reducing their vulnerability to increasing heat.
• Uncertainties are inherent in the implementation of adaptation options. This may relate to understandings of how the climate will change in the future (and how this may impact coffee production), but also includes social or economic uncertainties. These can make it more difficult to understand whether good decisions are being made for adaptation options and their implementation.
• As a result of these long-term scales and uncertainties, it can be difficult to attribute longer-term outcomes to specific activities. It can also be difficult to determine the value of ‘avoided costs’. For example, if a coffee rust outbreak does not occur, how do we know what role our adaptation measures played in preventing an outbreak?

It is also crucial that your M&E plan is developed as a learning tool in order to refine and improve adaptation options, and that knowledge is benefitted from and gained elsewhere. An M&E plan that promotes learning will enable you to reflect on your experiences and those of others, to improve adaptation measures and to adjust responses to future changes. It will help you understand which activities build resilience in coffee-growing communities and what enables this to happen.

Enhance your M&E by doing the following

• Being clear about what the different people involved in coffee production need to learn in order to improve their practices and build resilience
• Providing opportunities for people to share experiences of implementing adaptation measures and to provide insight and feedback to others
• Challenging people to think beyond their normal ways of doing things
• Offering low-risk ways to experiment with new ideas
• Ensuring messages from the evaluation feed into future coffee production planning when the evaluation is complete

If it is done well, the M&E process will improve coffee production by making practices more resilient to climate change and enhance your understanding of what works and how to overcome barriers and improve the capacity of farmers to learn. It will create opportunities for knowledge sharing between coffee farmers and build local knowledge about climate change, including how to best to respond.