Following planning, it is also important to highlight certain lessons from the implementation phase. These involve the need to closely monitor the approach and related outcomes so that adaptive change can occur, and the challenges of staying integrated. For the first, monitoring at both community and project levels are both important. The first ensures that farmers' own objectives, variables and observations are captured. While soil conservation may be a primary goal of researchers, for example, farmers may be more interested in minimizing short-term economic losses resulting from excess runoff in the form of seed and fertilizer—as illustrated in Ginchi. Another important reason to monitor at community level is to understand who is benefiting from watershed management activities. This requires that monitoring be conducted not only by direct beneficiaries, but by other watershed farmers. Evidence of poorly distributed program benefits can lead to negotiations between immediate and future beneficiaries to expand benefits to other farmers, as in the case of beneficiaries of seed potato production and spring development activities in Ginchi. Monitoring is also required to ensure that agreed upon actions are being followed in practice. Resolutions reached through multi-stakeholder negotiations in Ginchi and Lushoto, for example, were in some cases not implemented unless further follow-up was given by program personnel or community leaders. Monitoring at the program level is also important to ensure that cross-cutting program goals that might otherwise go unnoticed by farmers, such as equity and sustainability, are fostered. Continuous scrutiny by the program has also enabled identification of critical interventions required to ensure the success of earlier innovations. In Ginchi site, for example, negotiations to restrict free movement of livestock in outfields were later seen to be fundamental in ensuring that farmer investments in outfields were not put in jeopardy (due to livestock trampling or the heavy investment in labor and materials required of farmers to fence individual seedlings until established).

From a research standpoint, continuous self-reflection is required given the ongoing challenges of staying integrated and participatory. The institutional tendency to emphasize component rather than system goals (maximizing yield from or benefits to a single component, for example trees, soil, a specific crop, or livestock) can undermine landscape-level integration unless monitored. One discovery in this regard is that planning at the level of objectives, research questions and activities is insufficient; planning must also identify variables to be monitored (to ensure, for example, that the impact of a new intervention on diverse system components is effectively captured). Another critical area of ongoing learning is in the area of participation. There is a tendency to translate farmer objectives and variables into variables recognizable by researchers; close scrutiny is required to ensure that research designs are responsive to the priority goals and information gaps of farmers. Finally, when site teams undergo rigorous analyses of the system, there is always a challenge of ensuring that the community internalizes this "systems logic"—understanding, for example, how limited biomass or legumes in the system undermine system productivity, or how increased use of dung for fuel impacts upon soil fertility. The program continues to experiment in this regard, producing posters and leaflets to explain some of the linkages that inform the intervention strategies of outside actors.