By Michael Moses, Director of Advocacy & Programs, May 18, 2016

The GPSA Global Partners Forum 2016 kicks off here in Washington DC tomorrow. Hundreds of practitioners from across the globe, and across the social accountability landscape, will be in attendance. Planned sessions center on various topics, including methods of state-society collaboration, the 2017 World Development Report, and sector-specific approaches to improving accountability.

Most exciting, from our perspective, the agenda also makes room for discussions on the role of adaptive learning in social accountability. As readers of this blog will know, supporting processes of trying, learning and adapting is central to everything we do at Global Integrity. So we’re very excited to have the opportunity to take an active part in shaping and leading these discussions at the Forum. We’re contributing to the program in three ways:

1. First, tonight, we’re hosting an informal happy hour for Forum attendees and colleagues at our offices in the OpenGov Hub. This will be a great opportunity for catching up with old friends and connecting with new ones. If you’re interested in joining us, please email johannes.tonn@globalintegrity.org ASAP.
2. Second, we’re leading a workshop Thursday afternoon as part of the program focusing on learning for adaptive management. Our session, Learning at the Frontline, will bring together presenters from Ethiopia, Mexico, Mozambique, and South Africa. They’ll give quick lightning talks on how they’ve put adaptive learning into practice in their work, the challenges they’ve faced, and the ways in which they’ve addressed them. We’ll then break out into small group discussions, giving attendees an opportunity to reflect on and discuss whether and how adaptive learning approaches have been, or might be, a useful element of their work. We’ll close the workshop with a quick plenary in which we join the dots between and across individual experiences.
3. Third, we’re facilitating a session in which we’ll convene the leads from all of the workshops focused on learning for adaptive management. In Making Adaptive Learning the Norm, we intend to make the connections between the earlier breakouts on adaptive learning, and link them with broader efforts to support adaptive learning across the sector.

The Forum is an excellent opportunity to frame and advance the adaptive learning agenda. We’re excited to have the opportunity to drive some of the conversations on these issues, to take part in others, and to help the GPSA support attendees in their efforts to drive progress on open governance in their countries.