It’s an emotional subject

In advance of next month’s Conference on the Politics of Evidence, viagra recent weeks have found me speaking at meetings in Abuja, cure Geneva and Oxford.  Meeting participants were country programme staff, M&E specialists and head office programme/policy people in international NGOs and United Nations agencies.   What was the mood?

First of all relief among many participants to be in a collective space where it’s OK to talk about how they feel about what is happening to them – and to find that others were experiencing similar emotions of frustration of the impact of the results and evidence agenda on their jobs.  ‘All I do now is write reports’ said one. ‘I make up numbers’, said another, bitterly.  There is anger at the absurdity of ‘targetitis’ and the proliferation of tools and protocols.  People mentioned being forced to develop Theories of Change that ignored the ‘politics of how’ and the sheer stupidity of a large global programme that has 300 indicators for measuring change.  The long-standing anxiety was aired about how alternative pathways of change are ignored by the logical framework single linear cause-effect proposition.

There is despair that mandatory approaches to design, monitoring and reporting are ‘ignoring the knowledge of those you are working with and for. ’  One evaluation specialist spoke of how his organisation is being obliged to do ‘objective’ evaluations, excluding interviews with a programme’s diversity of stakeholders because these are seen as biased points of view.   Evaluations are increasingly ignoring ‘context and power relations, said another.

Participants – particularly those working at the country programme level – lamented how the results and evidence agenda was replacing collaboration with hierarchy because of upward reporting requirements. There is sorrow that relationships are being undermined and that the slow work of social change is being replaced by the delivery of superficial ‘results’ that can be reported to the donor as a quick ‘win but that does not have any lasting effects.

Several people spoke about the underlying differences of how development is understood and the need to capture the difference development agencies make in supporting long term changes in power relations.  Links were made between the results and evidence agenda with the prevalence of market discourses and neo-liberal approaches to development.

On the other hand, some people were pleased that M&E is no longer the Cinderella of the development industry. Let’s be honest. Evaluations were often either poor quality or non-existent, reporting was often shoddy and there was a lot of mess and muddle. The results and evidence agenda can provide a real opportunity to examine critically what and how we are doing and offers organisations greater chances than before of becoming genuine learning organisations.

I guess the issue is whether and how we learn to ride the tiger. Or do we have to change the nature of the beast?