Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation    

Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) is an approach to monitoring and evaluation that involves stakeholders in defining, tracking, measuring and making sense of the progress made by social change initiatives, such that they can respond to and build ownership of the process of understanding how change happens, as well as the results. It stands in contrast to mainstream M&E that is largely driven by a performance and upward accountability agenda, and favours expert views over lived experience and other forms of local knowledge. It was first born out of the movement for participatory development in the 1990s (Estrella and Gaventa, 1998).

PM&E today is finding its place in the rapidly shifting landscape of evaluation theory and practice in the international development and social change sectors, driven by greater appreciation for complexity in the causal pathways that evaluation aims to uncover, and a drive for equity and social justice. These trends are re-orienting the evaluation ecosystem, made up of commissioners, evaluators, programme implementers and monitoring and evaluation teams, towards approaches that prioritise learning and support meaningful participation to produce more nuanced and useful explanations of how change happens.

As an approach, PM&E is not simply about the application of participatory evaluation methods (of which there are many), but about how a range of stakeholders are included throughout the evaluation process to push towards greater opportunity for co-ownership and transformation – starting from setting the evaluation objectives, to designing the methodology all the way through to data collection, sensemaking and use of evaluation findings.

Across all types and phases of evaluation the central question to invite reflection on if and then how to ensure participation is meaningful is to first ask WHO to involve and to what end. Tensions and trade-offs around the value of participation for different stakeholders and the prioritised evidence use are common, calling for a principled approach to support appropriate fit rather than a naive normative stance of more is always better.

Design and principles

Based on Apgar & Allen (2021) the following principles can encourage evaluation designers, implementers, commissioners and users to navigate the tensions that necessarily arise in designing for meaningful participation in any evaluation process:

• Strive to be useful to relevant stakeholders, defining who is relevant is a critical first step;
• Choose methods that enable the experiences and values of stakeholders to drive design, data collection and analysis;
• Be aware of power in the process and strive to share it with participating stakeholders;
• Engage with the potential of the process as an outcome in its own right.

The following (adapted from White’s 1996 typology) orients around three types (or depths) of participation and the purpose they serve in an M&E process. This can support locating the intention of participation for different stakeholders.

Type	Purpose in M&E process
Instrumental	Efficiency and accuracy of evaluation findings – requires light involvement of a number of different stakeholders
Representative	To ensure findings reflect views of relevant stakeholders – opens space for stakeholders to influence findings and use (programme design, decisions etc.)
Transformative	Empowerment – to increase agency of people in decision making around programmes and findings – shift underlying power dynamics

Alongside situating the type of participation in an M&E process, it is necessary to consider how power influences the ability of any stakeholder to participate meaningfully, and, in particular when striving for transformative forms of participation, engaging directly with power dynamics becomes a central focus.

Transformative forms of evaluation are today being driven by emerging and long- standing communities of indigenous evaluation that centre indigenous values, ontologies and epistemologies and are shifting our undertanding of who owns and drives ‘participation’ Such movements are grounded in specific geographies where the Global Majority are located, such as Made in Africa Evaluation as one example. In the context of Maori-led evaluation in Aotearoa New Zealand, the focus now is on evaluation ‘as’ Māori-led where Māori have full control over all aspects of the evaluation guided by Māori knowledge and science. Here, Maori evaluators use the concept of ‘invitational space’ where participation in the evaluation is determined by Māori, and there is no assumed or guaranteed place for non-Māori evaluators who accept their participation is by invitation only.

Once the form of participation for different stakeholders is defined, then, methodological choice become the focus for design. There is a wide range of participatory evaluation methods many of which have a narrative focus, starting with stories of change from participants. Different types of stories (micro-narratives, outcome stories, stories of change, life stories) can be generated through different types of prompt questions:

• PhotoVoice
• Participatory Video
• Most Significant Change
• SenseMaker
• Outcome Harvesting

There are also broader methodologies for designing whole M&E systems in ways that build on stakeholder understanding of how they imagine change happening (the theory of change) and appropriate ways to track or explore causal pathways. Examples here include the well known Outcome Mapping approach to project design and M&E, as well as participatory approaches to Theory of Change. (Apgar & Douthwaite, 2021).

Recent movements within the participatory and equity-oriented evaluation communities, have been reflecting on appropriate forms of rigour to support quality claims in participatory evaluation. The Inclusive Rigour framework is one we are involved in developing.