Why is transformative change, and its assessment, important?

There is growing, urgent demand for solutions to climate, biodiversity, and food security challenges that are effective, inclusive, work at scale, and will be sustained over time. Thus, interventions should move beyond incremental objectives, to transformative ones. Funders and implementers are increasingly keen to achieve and claim transformative change, and see the private sector as playing a key role to leverage scarce aid resources. Defining and measuring success is challenging due to the complexity of forest-landscapes, which are constantly changing socio-ecological systems, with uncertainties and unpredictability. Further, the impacts of interventions frequently occur after project and programme interventions have ended. This brief explains what is transformative change, and how we can learn from assessing the extent to which programmes are transformative in design and early emerging evidence of effectiveness, with learning loops feeding such lessons back into adaptive management processes.