This guide offers a practical approach to connecting planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning in collaborative, multi-actor settings. These activities are often organised separately, making it difficult to connect intentions, action, evidence and the decisions that shape what happens next.
The guide focuses on keeping those connections useful as work develops. In place-based initiatives, people often work across organisations, communities and knowledge systems, with different responsibilities, expectations and understandings of change. Plans need to provide direction while remaining open to learning, and evidence needs to inform conversations and decisions throughout the work.
Drawing on systems thinking, evaluation and collaborative practice, the guide explores how shared direction, practical action, monitoring and structured judgement can support ongoing learning and adaptation.
At a glance: This guide supports practitioners who need to connect planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning across people, organisations and changing circumstances.
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What this guide covers
A practical six-step cycle for keeping the work connected is at the centre of the guide. It brings planning, action, evidence and learning into an ongoing process that can be revisited as understanding develops and circumstances change.
The guide also explores:
- why planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning become disconnected
- working with complexity, learning and accountability
- setting direction while remaining open to learning
- relationships, ethics and credible judgement
- organisational conditions that support learning and adaptation
- a changing landscape for evidence and judgement, including generative AI.
Throughout, the emphasis is on how these activities connect in practice and help people decide what to do next.
Who this is for
This guide is intended for people working in place-based and multi-actor initiatives, including:
- programme managers and policy staff
- evaluators and monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) practitioners
- facilitators and community coordinators
- applied researchers and others supporting collaborative change.
It is particularly relevant where responsibilities are shared, different perspectives need to be considered, and outcomes cannot be fully specified or predicted at the outset.
How it can be used
The guide can be read in full or used selectively to support work such as:
- designing a new initiative and its approach to planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning
- reviewing how these activities connect within existing work
- clarifying how evidence informs decisions and adaptation
- supporting discussions with partners about direction, responsibilities and learning
- identifying organisational conditions that help or hinder reflective practice.
The cycle provides a structure for returning to important questions over time. Teams may revisit earlier decisions as new evidence emerges, relationships develop and their understanding of the work changes.
Download the guide ( PDF)
Companion guide
This companion guide explores indicator development and use in greater practical depth, including conceptual frameworks, rubrics, structured judgement and practical monitoring tools. Keeping the work connected places that work within the wider connections among planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning. The two guides can be used independently or together.
Related pages on this site
- Supporting change in multi-actor settings – participation, collaborative processes and working with different perspectives
- Social learning – learning together, building shared understanding and connecting reflection with collective action
- Strategic planning and direction setting – clarifying direction and keeping plans open to revision
- Monitoring, evaluation and learning – evaluation and learning in complex settings
- Linking planning with monitoring and evaluation – connecting situation analysis, direction, action, evidence and adaptation
- Theory of change – making assumptions visible and linking intended changes with evidence and learning.
These pages provide additional guidance, tools and reflections that complement the approach outlined in the guide.
This guide is part of the series, Practical guides for collaborative and complexity-aware practice, developed through Learning for Sustainability. The website brings together resources and reflections on systems thinking, evaluation, collaboration and working in complex settings.