4.1. Program Design: Concepts

Why is an operational framework particularly necessary for collaborative initiatives?

Unit Outline:

Program design can be one of the most exciting aspects of Community Environmental Action Planning...or the most tedious. The more detailed your program design, the easier project implementation is likely to be - but at the same time, your design needs to incorporate a good deal of adaptability to support conflict sensitivity and flexibility to respond to participant feedback.

Solution identification involves basic checks for viability, using tools such as feasibility matrices and scenario forecasting. It is important to bear in mind that more detailed program design may uncover an unforeseen barrier. If this occurs, the group should return to solution identification tools with the additional knowledge, in order to determine a suitable alternative.

Program design is about pulling together the people, resources, and knowledge you need to successfully enact a chosen strategy. Particularly when engaging a diverse collective, it is important to develop a clear and agreed-upon structure that can serve as common ground and provide guidance during implementation. Unit 4 begins by highlighting the role of collective visioning in keeping root causes and fundamental goals at the centre of program design, and discusses the importance of flexibility balanced with structure. Module 4.2 introduces tools for resource and actor mapping, as well as logical framework analysis; resources to apply these techniques can be found in Module 4.3, with notes for participatory methods provided in Module 4.4.

Module Objectives:

- appreciate the role of collective visioning in guiding program design
- feel confident engaging donors in order to build more flexibility into project parametres
- understand logical framework analysis and its uses

Developing a Shared Vision

Understanding people's hopes and dreams is an important component of productive community engagement. It's also a powerful guide for program design.

Functionally, knowing the needs and desires of different entities - including those external to the CEAP process - in a socioenvironmental system will contribute to the robustness of actor analysis, which in turn can inform a realistic and detailed plan of action (see Modules 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4). But this isn't just about leveraging technical knowledge.

When transitioning from analysing to planning, defining community goals through collective visioning can serve to cement a shared identity among diverse actors cooperating in the CEAP process.

Building a shared vision is about understanding “why”. Why are we engaging in Community Environmental Action Planning? What, when all is said and done, are we trying to make happen? Answering these questions collaboratively will create a 'North Star' - a shared reference point that everyone is navigating by, ensuring that individual and collective decisions all head in the same direction.

Having a shared vision that is explicitly named and widely known can provide diverse community members with a source of shared passion, building cohesion and encouraging collaboration. During moments of internal tension, the shared vision becomes a place to return to, to remind all parties of common ground and collective desires. If uncertainty arises about how to react to an incident during project implementation, determining whether a proposed response 'gut checks' positively with the shared vision can support decision-making under pressure.

Another benefit of collective visioning is its affective nature. Many tools in program design are quite technical, delving into the nitty-gritty of action planning. But it's emotion and aspirations for a better future that will motivate continued involvement and action. Identifying and centring the collective vision can infuse technical processes with a sense of hope, creativity, and inspiration. As stated by the Transition network:

We don’t need to look far to find big challenges facing us now and in the future. Many people can’t rely on the basic things we need for a safe and happy life. Our seas are polluted and nature under threat. Thinking about how to respond to the changing climate, inequality and uncertainty can be overwhelming.

Yet many people have a strong desire to be part of making change and building something better. What if…we could reimagine our future as thriving, fairer, more resilient, more connected? How could that vision help us to move forward and take practical action towards a better future?

Curious about visioning strategies?

Transition is an international movement of communities coming together to explore how we get from one thing to another – from a damaging, polluting, unequal present to a fairer, more resilient, regenerative future for all.

Transition's visioning guide is designed to help groups and communities open up their imagination and start exploring what a better future could look like in their context. It helps to build a shared vision of what’s possible, a vital starting point to exploring how we can work together to make it a reality.

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Donor Relations

Relationships are the key to success in community engagement and participatory approaches, and the relationship with project funders is no different.

As highlighted in Unit 1, participatory methods should be engaged as early and extensively as possible in Community Environmental Action Planning. This ethos also extends to donors, who should be engaged early and often - especially if they require particular forms of reporting and/or have specified pre-determined objectives that must be met. Effective and genuine community engagement requires flexibility: in responding to the results of participatory analysis, in extending a deadline, in adapting the project's goals when the community's context changes. Alterations to the program structure, timeline, resource use, and goals are not most donors' favourite things - and thus, carefully cultivated donor relations will be crucial to a successful CEAP process.

Every donor will be different in their expectations and engagement level: Some funders have very specific accountability mechanisms but are very hands-off; others may be fully involved in the program but require relatively few formal reports.

Whoever the donor is, maintaining a healthy and open relationship with them is critical to project success, and a good program design will incorporate donor relations as part of the project structure and activities. This might include elements such as donor acknowledgement (bilaterally and/or publicly), responsible use and reporting of resources, and opportunities for involvement (e.g., attendance at planning meetings and/or project activities).

Specific to Community Environmental Action Planning, engaging diverse community members in donor relations can develop local capacity and help donors to understand the value of their adaptability and flexibility - but it's important to ensure that this engagement is collaborative and co-led, rather than performatively co-optive.

This toolbox on "Institutionalizing Conflict Sensitivity at the Organizational Level", designed by UNDP for the Lebanese context, may be useful in considering how to develop internal mechanisms for conflict sensitivity that will help prepare team and community members to engage donors in important conversations. FLAG FOR SILJA - ARE YOU HAPPY FOR US TO CITE THIS NON-UNEP SOURCE?

Looking for more detail?

The Conflict Sensitivity Community Hub (CSC-Hub) is a Community of Practice supporting the integration of conflict sensitivity in development, humanitarian, peacebuilding, security, research, and business. The network's policy brief on Promoting conflict sensitivity amongst donor agencies highlights recommendations for donors on how to integrate conflict sensitivity in their processes, and will be useful for practitioners in guiding relationships with their funders.

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Promoting conflict sensitivity amongst donor agencies - World

Logical Framework Analysis

When designing an intervention, it is important to ensure that your planned activities are aligned with your goals, and that the connection between them is close enough that you'll be able to evaluate progress. There are many ways to do this, but one particularly widely used approach is the 'logframe'.

In the 1960s and '70s, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) developed and popularised a particular methodology for project planning called Logical Framework Analysis (LFA). Goal Oriented Project Planning (GOPP) or Objectives Oriented Project Planning (OOPP) are similar approaches. Today, many major funding agencies use and/or expect their implementing partners to make use of the logical framework analysis.

Broadly speaking, a logical framework (or 'logframe') summarises a program's design by detailing the baseline situation, project activities and their goals, indicators that will measure each activity's results, and a timeline of milestones. During program design, a planning matrix can help guide decision-making about actions and targets, encouraging communities to ensure alignment while considering risks and assumptions.

A standard logframe takes the form of a 4x4 table whose rows explore the goal, outcomes, outputs, and activities. Columns will generally detail the project summary, indicators, evidence sources, and risks or assumptions - though many agencies and organisations adapt the approach, and may use different matrix set-ups to summarise their process.

Logical frameworks can support the program design phase of Community Environmental Action Planning by providing a clear structure for operationalisation and evaluation. Everyone involved in the planning process should be able to understand and articulate an intervention's motivations and objectives, and the collaborative construction of a logframe can support that shared understanding of the project.

Logframes are not without their limitations and criticisms - they can be overly formulaic, they do not easily account for a changing project context, and they are so widely used that they are rarely well used. Rather than requiring the use of a specific logframe, Community Environmental Action Planning approaches highlight the importance of (1) understanding and engaging with planning and reporting mechanisms that may be well-known to communities and donors, and (2) ensuring that the program design phase builds consensus among the community about the project's activities, goals, and intended results.

EXACT Wiki: Logical Framework Approach

Want to understand donor perspectives?

In addition to the practical support it offers for planning, one of the reasons to use logical framework analysis during the program design phase is because it is a very common requirement for funding applications and donor reporting.

Many grant-giving agencies will have their own templates, requirements, and training tools for logframes. See, for example, this entry in EXACT, the EU External Action Wiki.

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