Resonance has been in the partnership business for over two decades, often working with multiple stakeholders in robust cross-sector collaborations.Whether it’s access to clean water, women’s empowerment for inclusive supply chains, sustainable fisheries management, or harnessing entrepreneurial solutions through open innovation and innovative finance, as challenges become more complex, we often need strategies that are novel and creative.
At the same time, impact partnerships often deploy approaches that have a proven track record for addressing projects or processes. This is true of the Collaborating, Learning & Adapting (CLA) Framework.
What is The Collaborating, Learning & Adapting (CLA) Framework?
CLA is one approach to managing and improve effectiveness of complex development initiatives and activities adaptively and iteratively. It is a framework accompanied by guidance that recognizes strategic collaboration, continuous learning, and adaptive management link together all components in the Program Cycle.
In the simplest terms, incorporating with deliberateness effective CLA design across the entire initiative and programmatic activities can help development practitioners address challenges by thinking through:
Collaborating: Are we collaborating with the right partners at the right time to promote long-term synergy rather than designing approaches to solve an immediate problem without regard to future connectivity or integration with other systems?
Learning: Are we asking the most important questions and finding answers that are relevant to decision making?
Adapting: Are we using the information that we gather through collaboration and learning activities to make better decisions and adjustments as necessary?
Enabling Conditions: Are we working in an organizational environment that supports our collaborating, learning, and adapting efforts?
Borrowing directly from the former USAID, CLA’s importance lies in:
Integrating CLA into sustainable impact work helps to ensure that programs are coordinated with others, grounded in a strong evidence base, and iteratively adapted to remain relevant throughout implementation.
The systematic application of CLA approaches, led by people who have the knowledge and resources to carry them out, enables partners to be effective learning organizations and thereby a more effective development and implementing organizations.
CLA Can Yield Intentional Collaboration, Improved Outcomes, And Sustainable Impact
The dynamic cycle of CLA is ongoing and iterative. By looking to the past, present, and future, organizations coalesce partners and sector stakeholders around approaches that produce lasting results, measure those results in meaningful ways, and ensure that the important feedback loop between learning and adaptation continues.
Although initially built for USAID, CLA frameworks have immense transferable value for private sector companies, philanthropy, and cross-sector partnerships.
Whether embarking or embedding ESG, UNSDGs, Scope 3, or Sustainable Impact initiatives, CLA can be one of many guiding tools in effective change management for pressing breakpoint change that can lead to impactful outcomes long-term.
