Participatory Monitoring And Evaluation

Participatory monitoring and evaluation (PME) is an approach to performance review in which stakeholders in an intervention (local citizens, policy makers, funding agencies, and nongovernmental organizations) work together to decide how to assess progress, conduct data collection and analysis, and take action on their findings. Participatory monitoring is mainly concerned with short-term performance assessment of outputs and outcomes; participatory evaluation is primarily focused on longer term outcomes and impacts. Both activities encourage mutual learning and knowledge production by stakeholders and adjustment of the design or operations of the intervention in light of what is learned.

The purpose of participatory monitoring and evaluation may be transformative in respect to its focus on seeking to give voice, knowledge, and justice to marginalized social groups. More often, PME has been undertaken for more instrumental reasons; that is, to render interventions more effective and sustainable. PME has been widely practiced at the project, program, institutional, and (more recently) policy levels in international development in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. This approach has also been applied to social-service programs in North America and Europe. Antecedents and derivations of PME include participatory impact assessment, participatory rapid appraisal, participatory action research, participatory learning and action, beneficiary assessment, institutional self-assessment, self-evaluation, empowerment evaluation, and fourth-generation evaluation.

There are 10 key steps in the PME cycle: deciding who participates, forming a multistakeholder vehicle to lead the process (a committee, task force, or working group), establishing goals for the PME exercise, identifying key performance issues for assessment, developing results indicators, gathering relevant data, analyzing the findings, preparing the report, sharing the findings, and taking action on the findings. A wide range of data collection techniques can be used in PME that blend qualitative and quantitative research methods. Qualitative methods may include open-ended interviews, focus groups, community meetings, and group visualization techniques (e.g., asset mapping). Quantitative methods may include large-scale, closed-ended household surveys, computerized statistical analysis, cost-benefit studies, and economic modeling. Gender-sensitive procedures can and should be used across all methods.

As with all participatory processes, the quality of stakeholder participation can range from low-level participation, in the form either of information sharing (one-way communication) or of consultation (two-way communication), to high-level participation, in the form of shared control over decisions and resources or of an outright transfer of control over decisions and resources to citizens or program participants. In the latter three forms, the role of the professional is that of a facilitator among stakeholder interests, ensuring that the weaker voices in particular are heard and exert influence in the process.

Participatory monitoring and evaluation can be time consuming and expensive at the front end of the process. Authentic stakeholder engagement takes time. Additional professional involvement adds costs to the budget, although other stakeholders—especially citizens—contribute their time and absorb opportunity costs. However, experience has shown that the downstream benefits significantly outweigh the front-end costs of PME. The insights, solutions, and new knowledge generated by the PME process yield improvements in the effectiveness of the intervention that translate into important short-term and long-term gains and savings. At the same time, managers of PME processes need senior-level champions inside the institution, as well as allies outside, to support the longer (compared to more conventional approaches) timespans of PME initiatives.

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