The use of indicators for monitoring and evaluation of adaptation: lessons from development cooperation agencies

In the context of scaled-up funding for climate change adaptation, it is more important than ever to guarantee value for money of adaptation interventions. Robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) ensures that the prospective benefits of interventions are being realized and it helps to improve the design of future projects and programmes. This paper is the first empirical assessment of M&E frameworks used by development cooperation agencies for projects and programmes with adaptation-specific or adaptation-related components. It analyses documents for 106 projects across 6 bilateral development agencies. The analysis finds that Result Based Management, the Logical Framework Approach and the accompanying logframe are the most common M&E approaches used for adaptation. In applying these approaches, the long-term perspective of most adaptation initiatives means that it is particularly important to clearly differentiate between outcomes, outputs and activities. In addition, M&E frameworks for adaptation should ...