Monitoring adaptation to enhance food security: A survey of approaches and best practice. CCAFS Working Paper No. 51

Abstract

As adaptation to climate change is a major theme for CCAFS, the programme needs a method for monitoring and evaluating interventions intended to foster adaptation and enhance adaptive capacity across food systems. This report explored current approaches to monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation projects and specifically how food security outcomes are being addressed. It emerged that monitoring and evaluation of adaptation projects is fairly new, and most documents outline frameworks rather than report on specific experiences. This was particularly true for food security per se, which was not an explicit focus of many of the adaptation projects that were assessed. This made it difficult to summarize best practice and to describe the most reliable indicators for assessing impacts of adaptation interventions on food security outcomes. Consequently, in line with recent discussions within CCAFS about the goals of using monitoring and evaluation to foster adaptive management and social learning the approach was shifted toward an outcome-oriented focus. This promotes active learning from monitoring and evaluation as the programme activities are implemented. This paper makes six key recommendations reflecting these new discussions.

Citation

Chesterman, S.; Ericksen, P. Monitoring adaptation to enhance food security: A survey of approaches and best practice. CCAFS Working Paper No. 51. CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), Copenhagen, Denmark (2013) 45 pp.

Published 1 January 2013