The Participatory Land Use Planning Activity's (PLUP’s) linkage to the rest of the Green Prosperity Project changed early in the compact. A program design or implementation change midway can create significant challenges both for ensuring and evaluating results. PLUP was originally designed to lay a foundation of geospatial information to attract investment to targeted geographic areas and morphed into an approach to ensure that already-proposed investments were supported by geospatial information and follow safeguards. The economic argument for PLUP changed with this design change and the program logic had to be redefined. The implications of this fundamental change were not well understood across all team members. This posed challenges for ensuring a match between PLUP implementation (which had already been structured) and the achievement of newly defined results. Similarly, it created challenges for designing a relevant evaluation. More detailed thinking about the theory of change for standalone PLUP benefits may have prevented the risks to use of outputs and sustainability of results highlighted by the evaluation. Therefore, adequate consideration should be given to programmatic changes that affect the theory of change.
Lesson Learned