AS ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE BECOMES THE focus of increasing attention and the target of significant spending, there is a growing need for frameworks and tools that enable organisations to track and assess the outcomes of adaptation interventions.

This paper suggests a coherent framework for climate change adaptation programming, including potential indicators, or indicator categories/types, for tracking and evaluating the success of adaptation support and adaptation interventions.

The paper begins with a discussion of some of the key issues related to the evaluation of adaptation, and outlines some of the main difficulties and constraints with respect to the development of...

FOLLOWING ON FROM THE ARGUMENTS PRESENTED in Part 1 of this paper, a framework is proposed that seeks to provide a means of answering the following question, which are the starting point for the evaluation of adaptation:

1 To what extent have adaptation interventions resulted in the integration of climate risk management into development policy and planning, or enhanced existing climate risk management capabilities?

2 To what extent have adaptation interventions increased the ability of individuals, communities and institutions to development and pursue their own adaptation strategies and measures (building adaptive capacity)?

3 To what extent have adaptation interventions reduced...

The approach described above is by no means a ‘magic bullet’ that will solve the wicked problem of assessing what constitutes ‘good’ adaptation, and it is not intended as such. Rather, it is a work in progress that represents a first step towards the development of a coherent framework for the evaluation of adaptation, and is intended as a contribution to the discussion on this topic among the communities of adaptation and development practitioners. At this juncture, the following conclusions can be drawn:

The indicators proposed above are not intended to substitute for indicators and processes at the country level,...

THE NEXT STAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE adaptation evaluation framework described above is to pilot the framework in a number of development and adaptation contexts. It is intended to operationalise the framework through pilot studies in a number of countries (probably 5 countries in total). The strategy for undertaking these pilot studies is outlined in Figure 3, which also indicates the intended goal and outcomes associated with the development and operationalisation of the framework in a schematic representation of a theory of change.

The piloting of the framework in a number of national contexts will involve a number of...