Understanding systemic change: innovative approaches to monitoring, learning and adaptation in the UNDP’s work to reduce deforestation

Abstract

This article explores innovations in monitoring, evaluation and learning being promoted and adopted by the United Nations Development Program in their activities to promote Forest Positive Agriculture. Using the UNDP’s new Causality Assessment for Landscape Interventions (CALI) as an illustrative example, it discusses the importance of adaptive and systemic approaches to understanding change for organizations and projects that are seeking to generate positive change or ecological transformation in complex systems. These innovative measurement practices and principles employed by the UNDP to reduce deforestation can serve as inspiration for a range of actors addressing this and other systemic challenges that must be addressed to bring about ecological transformation.