MCC should be realistic with land investments that have dependencies on or with other non-land investments and ensure appropriately defined achievable project objectives informed by well-designed theory of change (TOC). While the Participatory Land Use Project (PLUP) was redesigned from a foundational component of the Green Prosperity (GP) Project to a standalone activity, the overall TOC for PLUP was not revised to reflect the new expected outcomes and the causal link to GP objectives was maintained even though they were not directly related to PLUP’s implemented activities. The evaluation highlighted some positive outcomes from PLUP but given the complexity of PLUP’s objective and TOC, such results are only observed at the output level. Effectively, there was no evidence to suggest short term outcomes contributed to PLUP’s investment objective of improving land productivity. PLUP activities that focused on participation, awareness, and capacity building were deemed important to effective participatory land use planning but not comprehensive enough to alter the land permitting process or land productivity as indicated in the TOC. Similarly, trends in usage of geospatial data (less than 30% of geographic information system survey respondents) to identify conflicts and land degradation, usage had not translated to land productivity gains as of the endline evaluation. Therefore, MCC should revise project TOC to ensure accurate causal linkages to intended outcomes when design changes are made during project implementation. MCC's continual improvements in the approach to project design and program logic development since the time of Indonesia compact signing in 2013 will help to avoid this in the future.
Lesson Learned