Who loses if this succeeds?
Name them. Every ocean intervention creates trade-offs: a fleet, a licence holder, a middleman or a ministry budget line. Unnamed losers surface later as unexplained delays.
The Delivery Gap.
A practical test for the distance between strategy and delivery.
Ocean programmes often secure approval and funding before governance, incentives and accountability are ready to carry the work. The Delivery Gap makes that risk visible before implementation starts.
Test4 questions
Required answer1 sentence
Live risk1 gap
Escalation2+ gaps
Named mechanism
Find delivery risk before the money moves.
The Delivery Gap is a diagnostic mechanism for ocean programmes moving from approved strategy into operating reality.
It focuses on the risks that conventional scorecards miss: unnamed trade-offs, unowned interfaces, conflicting time horizons and delivery models that depend on outside advisers remaining indefinitely.
Funders, governments and delivery partners can use the four questions below before disbursement, mobilisation or a major programme reset.
Canonical definition
The Delivery Gap is the distance between an organisation's approved strategy and its ability to produce durable outcomes in operating reality.
The four-question Delivery Gap Test
4 diagnostic questionsWho owns the join?
Name the single person or entity accountable for the interfaces between partners, ministries and workstreams. If the answer is “the steering committee”, nobody owns the join.
What is the horizon mismatch?
State the political cycle against the ecological recovery timeline in years, then state what carries the work across the gap. If nothing does, the programme has an expiry date it does not yet recognise.
Who is still here in year five?
Name the local institution, counterpart or community maintaining the work after consultants depart. If the honest answer is “us”, the programme has built dependency rather than durable delivery.
Any question that cannot be answered in a single sentence is a live delivery risk. Two or more indicate that disbursement can continue on schedule while the intended outcome fails to arrive.