Padraka Foundation, Learning, Measurement, and Evaluation Fellow
About the portfolio organization
Living Landscapes (anchoring the Common Ground initiative):
Living Landscapes is a lean backbone organisation, being set up to anchor Common Ground, a collaborative systems entrepreneurship initiative in the domain of environmental governance and rural livelihoods, in India. It will focus on ‘field setting’, so that entrepreneurial action by multiple actors is accelerated and multiplied, seeding the ecosystem with institutional apparatus and change leaders to leave a legacy that is beyond any single initiative. By connecting and convening actors, Living Landscapes will nurture relationships with and between networks of partners (governments, philanthropy, and other market and civil society actors) to provide the catalytic impetus necessary to spur action and amplify impact. The organisation will endeavour to help establish trust, agility and diversity within the initiative, by promoting a collegial way of working, while also ensuring regulatory compliance and accountability to outcomes. Living Landscapes has been incorporated as a non-profit organisation in India under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013.
The Common Ground Initiative:
Common Ground seeks to leverage the unique opportunity presented by the Commons to address three linked crises of our times – livelihoods, climate, and social equity – by bringing in a socio-ecological narrative into mainstream development models, through a collaborative action framework.
205 million acres, a quarter of India’s landmass, is covered by community forests, pastures and water bodies. These land and water Commons are deeply intertwined with people’s lives and livelihoods, are associated with traditional institutions of self-governance, and are central to climate action and resilient rural economies. Through clearly defined pathways and intervention strategies, Common Ground aims to purposefully tackle the system level barriers and opportunities faced by several organisations and initiatives in the environmental governance and rural livelihoods domain, to amplify impact at scale.
By building connections, processes, and shared knowledge systems, and by convening and connecting actors at various levels (local to national), across thematic domains (water, forests, pastures, fisheries, climate, rural livelihoods) and across functional domains (government, business, tech initiatives), Common Ground will catalyse the Commons ecosystem for resilient ecological, social and economic outcomes at the local level. The initiative is led by Jagdeesh Rao (former Chief Executive of the Foundation for Ecological Security), as the Chief Convener.
About the Fellowship role
Common Ground seeks to create system-level changes in community-led governance of commons through evidence-based research, strategic collaboration, and effective learning systems. To achieve this vision, the initiative has established a Learning, Measurement and Evaluation (LME) Hub that aims to channel learnings towards effective strategic execution, build evidence for outcomes and impacts, and translate policy-practice insights for diverse stakeholders.
The LME Hub works across Common Ground's five working group pathways: (i) translating policy-practice-financial flows towards context-specific ecological conservation, (ii) strengthening effectiveness of grassroot level action, (iii) tilting market opportunities to favour resilient, equitable rural livelihoods, (iv) building open infrastructure for system-wide collaboration and innovation, and (v) accelerating and amplifying impact in favour of commons and community stewardship.
The LME Fellow will work closely with the Lead of Learning, Measurement, and Evaluation to and the working plans approved by the Hub and to facilitate the dissemination of the learnings that result from these plans across the Common Ground Collaborative. This 12-month project role focuses on designing and strengthening evaluation frameworks, supporting targeted research studies, coordinating with academic and other research partners, developing knowledge products and establishing learning loops that translate evidence into actionable insights for governments, funders, NGOs, academia, and community organizations.
Location: Preferably Hyderabad or Bengaluru, India
Employment: Full-time, one-year Fellowship
Starting Date: July 2026
Key responsibilities
- Co-design and implement learning, measurement, and evaluation (LME) frameworks for Common Ground's pathways
- Develop, test, refine, and finalize context-specific indicators and data collection tools for community-led conservation outcomes
- Support the development and administration of dashboards and other tools for periodic data collection that can enable harvesting of insights and learnings.
- Support the design and implementation of 2-3 targeted evaluation research studies in collaboration with academic partners
- Build evaluation protocols that capture both quantitative outcomes and qualitative community narratives
- Coordinate with academic institutes and research partners to initiate independent evaluations
- Synthesize learnings from field-level interventions across multiple geographies and partner organizations for diverse stakeholders within and outside Common Ground Collaborative.
- Document case studies, process learnings, and impact stories from grassroots implementation
- Develop artefacts (policy briefs, research reports, infographics, presentations) tailored for specific stakeholder audiences
- Support the creation of digital knowledge repositories and learning platforms
- Contribute to internal learning sessions and external knowledge-sharing events
- Facilitate learning exchanges between Working Groups and partners
- Contribute to fundraising efforts by developing evidence-based cases for support
Requirements
Experience and education:
- Master's degree in Development Studies, Public Policy, Environmental Science, Social Science Research, Statistics, or related field
- 3-5 years in measurement, evaluation especially within a systems change context, research, or learning roles within development sector, preferably in environment/natural resource management
- Demonstrated experience designing and implementing evaluation frameworks or research studies
- Experience working with grassroots organizations, community-based initiatives, or commons governance contexts
Technical skills:
- Strong research methodology skills (qualitative or quantitative)
- Proficiency in data analysis tools – quantitative (SPSS, R, STATA, Excel, or similar) or qualitative (NVivo, Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, or similar)
- Experience with participatory evaluation approaches and community engagement
- Excellent report writing and data visualization skills
Competencies:
- Analytical thinking with ability to synthesize complex information
- Strong communication skills – ability to translate technical research for diverse audiences
- Collaborative mindset with experience in multi-stakeholder environments
- Self-motivated with project management capabilities
- Comfort with ambiguity and ability to design systems from scratch
Desired qualifications:
- Experience with policy research or policy-practice translation
- Knowledge of ecological conservation, commons governance, or rural livelihoods
- Prior work with academic-practitioner collaborations
- Experience creating knowledge products for policy audiences
- Background in systems thinking or theory of change development
- Regional language proficiency (Telugu, Hindi, or other Indian languages)
- Geospatial analysis skills (GIS, remote sensing, spatial data analysis)
Must Haves:
- Indian work permit or eligibility to work in India is required.
About the LGT Impact Fellowship
How to apply
