DESIGNING PROJECTS IN A RAPIDLY CHANGING WORLD

BOX C
Intervention options and adaptive implementation pathways from RAPTA
• Intervention options developed using RAPTA
may include:
• measures to change national laws and
policies that currently limit the ability of
households to adapt – e.g. food prices or
drought relief policies
• measures that are necessary foundations for
adaptation – e.g. sound local governance
or improved equity in land tenure and
decision-making
• measures to prevent irreversible change – e.g.
maintaining topsoil depth above critical levels
• filling important knowledge gaps.
• Adaptive implementation pathways: single
interventions are seldom sufficient, and on
their own can often have unwanted secondary
effects. Where more than one intervention is
called for, interventions must be sequenced into
pathways which are themselves monitored and
adapted as circumstances change and understanding
grows.
Figure shows:
• the RAPTA process (inside the blue frame)
• proposed meta-indicators 2 for reporting on the application,
progress and outcomes of the process
(orange frame below). These are intended to meet
the need for indicators which can be reported in a
consistent fashion at national level. These meta-indicators
could provide:
• consistent summaries of the types of actions or
interventions that may be appropriate
• quantitative measures of the progress of resilience
and adaptation planning and implementation,
showing how widely RAPTA has been applied
across the target region or systems
• quantitative measures of the quality of the assessment
with respect to factors such as robustness, salience,
2 Meta-indicators are indicators that provide information about other
indicators or about the process of identifying indicators. Further work
is required to develop meta-indicators, which are not detailed in these
RAPTA Guidelines.
transparency and replicability of the process.
• inputs (upper white frame on the right), such as
data and indicators from other sources (some examples
are given). The RAPTA process helps users
to identify key attributes and controlling variables
for their system, and users should choose those
indicators most relevant to these key aspects. In
this way RAPTA enables users to focus effort and
resources on the most meaningful and useful data
for their project. The relevant inputs will be very
specific to a system/project, so no universal set of
input indicators is defined. They are not dealt with
in detail in these guidelines.
• outputs (e.g. project planning documentation,
knowledge, and sequenced sets of interventions,
see Box C).
The components in the RAPTA process are applied
iteratively and to varying levels of detail as
the project is developed from identification, to design,
implementation and legacy phases (Figure 2).
22 Introduction to RAPTA