It is often difficult to capture all adaptation requirements, even if you have analysed the solution, your organisation, users and community members, your partners, and other key aspects of the local context. Therefore, it can be useful to try and capture how all these elements relate to each other, in order to identify any gaps.
Understanding ecosystems can be both complex and daunting. There are generally two ways that ecosystems are analysed. The more traditional way is to view them from an ‘actor-centric’ perspective, listing the actors in a predefined system, e,. within a humanitarian context, as we do with the Humanitarian Parameters Box tool.
However, another way to assess ecosystems is by considering them as ‘configurations of activity defined by a value proposition’ (Adner, 2016). So, if your solution should be providing value for the problem holder (e.g. potable water), in order to deliver and sustain that value, you need to consider the actors and actions that need to be in place. We suggest that you use a Value Network Analysis as a way of capturing a mutually exclusive, completely exhaustive (MECE) view of actors and actions that need to be in place within the local ecosystem.