Schuman S. - The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation (2005)(en)

Importance of this change as viewed by the community: We have pride in what we have accomplished. It makes us think about other things we want to do.

Children now have a more conducive environment for learning. Before, children were easily distracted from their studies because of the condition of the building. Moving their desks to avoid dripping rainwater became a game. The school was full of noise and laughter when they should have been attending to their lessons. The students were also careless about the use of the building and of their educational materials; they simply tracked mud into the building with little regard to the mess it made. Since books and other materials were always becoming wet, students didn’t take very good care of them. Now, children are much more careful and remove their muddy shoes before coming in and put their books away. They are no longer distracted and are better able to focus their attention on their studies.

Importance of this change as viewed by the community: Anything that encourages children to be more serious about their studies is important for parents.

We learned practical details about supervising projects during renovation of the school. We were very poor supervisors in the past. Though we contributed money, we did not adequately give attention to how it was used or where it went. Then in the end we were disappointed. In doing this project, we learned a lot of things about making good preparation plans, attracting good contractors, and then overseeing their work. The tender [contractual] guidelines were especially valuable for us since we had never had that kind of experience before. Everyone knew exactly what was happening and why.

Importance of this change as viewed by the community: Without good supervision, nothing happens. We know because we had a lot of past failures due to poor supervision!

Confidence has been gained for launching new development activities.

Several years ago we tried to improve our church. When the money we collected disappeared, we became discouraged and quit. Completion of the school has encouraged us to try again on the church. Work is underway now. We are applying lessons learned from the school work; we only pay part of the money at the beginning and will make full payment only after work is completed.

Importance of this change as viewed by the community: People are now ready to do more things together.

Asset-Based Community Development

The PM&E system discussed here is drawn directly from work with three innovative development programs that built on local assets. The first was the Community Empowerment Program (CEP) in central Ethiopia. It involved 309 villages across five districts during a three-and-a-half-year period of operation and was funded by Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Bergdall and Powell, 1996). The second was the Governance and Local Democracy (GOLD) program in the Philippines. It was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and involved hundreds of local communities in numerous districts across the country (Bergdall, 1997). Third was the Topola Rural Development Program (TRDP) in central Serbia. It was a municipal development program, also funded by Sida, that included development activities in thirty-two small, outlying rural communities (Opto International AB, 2003).

Asset-based community development focuses on the capacities and strengths of communities and rests on the conviction that sustainable development emerges from within, not from outside, by mobilizing and building on existing resources (Kretzmann and McKnight, 1993). This is in contrast to many community development programs that might be characterized as needs based, that is, focusing on problems and deficiencies and following strategies for injecting various forms of external support. This tends to reinforce a sense of needy people being either passive clients waiting to receive services or hapless victims dependent on the generosity of outsiders for assistance and help. Asset-based development fosters a sense of community residents being active agents of their own development (Giddens, 1987, 1990). This is a role of an engaged citizenship whereby people take charge themselves for planning and initiating proactive steps to respond to the challenges that confront them.

A shared intention in all three programs was to enable a shift in community participation from passive involvement to active engagement. All were about catalyzing change. The PM&E system that emerged from those programs is envisioned as a complement for continuing the transformative process.

Images and the Dynamics of Change

If change and transformation are primary aims of social programs and participatory monitoring and evaluation, then it is important to have a framework for understanding how change occurs.

Behavior, the way people act, is directly connected to how they see themselves in the world, which is a matter of self-perception, self-story, self-image. These are all ways of saying the same thing and are based on a constructionist view of knowledge (Long and Long, 1992). Many have conceptualized such constructions as that of an image (Tye, 1991; Beach, 1990; Cooperrider, 1990; Lazarus, 1977; Polak, 1973). Kenneth Boulding’s book, The Image, remains a seminal work on the subject (1956). Images are ways of understanding the world and envisioning one’s place in it. They occur in connection with multiple reference points: time, space, nature, society, personal relationships, and emotions. “Knowledge, perhaps, is not a good word for this. Perhaps one would rather say my image of the world. Knowledge has an implication of validity, of truth. What I am talking about is what I believe to be true; my subjective knowledge” (Boulding, 1956, p. 2). Images, however, are also relevant to presumed scientific truth.

The scientific method merely stands as one among many of the methods whereby images change and develop. The development of images is part of the culture or subculture in which they are developed, and it depends upon all the elements of that culture or subculture. Science is a subculture among subcultures. It can claim to be useful. It may rather more dubiously claim to be good. It cannot claim to give validity [Boulding, 1956, p. 6].

Images are constructed by individuals; they are also constructed by groups when images are collectively shared and acted on among individuals. These images include self-perceptions that account for attitudes, opinions, ideas, beliefs, and customs. Boulding maintains that the construction of images largely governs the behavior of individuals and groups. This is the second proposition of his image theory: people act in accordance with the images they have of themselves and their place in the world.

Images go through a continual process of change and reconstruction. Most involve minor adjustments as new pieces of information, or “messages” as Boulding calls them, are aligned with an existing image. Messages come in many forms: verbal, visual, and experiential. They also come in varying degrees of strength. For example, while one might read about the negative health effects of fatty foods, a heart attack conveys a much stronger message about the need to act on the information. Most change in behavior is incremental as an image is gradually altered through

the accumulation of consistent messages. Radical changes in behavior occur when an established image is replaced by a totally new self-understanding.

Boulding’s understanding about knowledge and change can be summarized in five points: (1) people live out of images, (2) images control behavior, (3) images are created by messages, (4) images can change, and (5) when images change, behavior changes.

Aims of PM&E Based on Stories of Change

This approach to participatory evaluation has been applied within programs oriented toward asset-based community development in Ethiopia, Serbia, and the Philippines. It is a modification of similar PM&E work done earlier in Bangladesh (Davies, 1998). These programs have shared four basic aims in regard to participatory evaluation:

•The primary purpose of PM&E is to enable learning. The emphasis is more on enhancing proactive practices and improving the ability of community residents to become agents of their own development than on attempting to measure long-term impact. While some indications of outcomes are necessary for such learning to occur, they are not the primary driving force.

•PM&E is a participatory process that is directly useful to beneficiaries. Initial data collection, analysis, and responsive action take place at the community level. PM&E work is driven first and foremost by the needs of insiders, that is, community residents, rather than by the needs of outsiders, for example, senior managers, donors, and other interested parties external to the local situation.

•All stakeholders are tied together in one unifying PM&E conversation. Both outsiders and insiders have legitimate concerns. An effective PM&E system should encourage issues of concern to all stakeholders to be addressed based on a single body of information that is defined and found to be meaningful and useful by all stakeholders. A single, unifying conversation on these PM&E topics should link these different stakeholders.

•The PM&E system is to remain relatively simple. Many approaches to PM&E suffer from unrealistically high ambitions, especially during early stages of design, resulting in overly complex systems. A large amount of information is often included on the unspecified possibility that it might be useful to someone eventually. Overloaded with self-imposed demands to gather, manage, and store data, these ambitious systems repeatedly break down and fall into disuse. A good PM&E design intends to avoid this danger.

Design Features for PM&E and Stories of Change

Consistent with these aims and objectives, the PM&E system based on stories of change is built around five basic design features: (1) quarterly PM&E review meetings with community representatives, (2) PM&E meetings with midlevel stakeholders, (3) involvement of higher-level stakeholders, (4) verification, and (5) feedback.

Quarterly PM&E Review Meetings with Community Stakeholders Regular community review meetings are the foundational activity of this system. The first meeting usually occurs three months after a communitywide planning event. The review meeting follows these steps:

1.Verbal progress reports by community coordinators that provide objective information about local projects previously prioritized by the community

2.Reflections by participants on the current status of each project, for example, identification of success factors, difficulties encountered in project implementation, and suggestions for ways to overcome difficulties

3.Planning of new implementation activities to complete these projects (or planning new projects if any were completed)

4.Identifying significant changes, based on their own criteria, that have occurred during the past three months

The first step, objective information about progress on the local projects, enables the recording of selective quantitative information. This information simply tracks the accomplishments of community projects (for example, number of wells rehabilitated, total meters of terracing completed, number of tree seedlings planted and distributed) based on whatever the community had prioritized as projects.

The last step, identifying significant changes, is the most innovative aspect of this approach. This involves participants’ brainstorming changes that have occurred in the community, selecting the four changes they think are most important, and stating their reasons for making these selections. Participants decide for themselves criteria for making their choices.

The photographs in Exhibit 24.2 are related to the stories of change in Exhibit 24.1. They come from a community in Serbia (Ovsiste in the Topola municipality) during a PM&E review meeting in March 2003. The photos show stages of progress on the school renovation project in Ovsiste. Photos like these are a good way to enhance other participatory evaluation techniques. The final two pictures in the

sequence were taken during the community ceremony to celebrate completion of the project. The portrait on the wall is of Radoje Domanovi´c, a famous nineteenthcentury Serbian writer and satirist who was born in the village. When renovations were completed, the school was renamed in his honor.

Exhibit 24.2

School Renovation Activities by Ovsiste Community Members

Quarterly PM&E Meetings with Midlevel Stakeholders Building on these community PM&E review meetings (and the selection of significant stories of change), special PM&E meetings are held during a reporting period when key midlevel stakeholders, for example, district or municipal officials, meet together for an hour or so to review data generated by local communities. The review meeting at this level begins with discussion about statistics compiled from project activities. (Two illustrative tables from the Community Empowerment Program in Ethiopia are found in the appendixes at the end of the chapter.) Tables that summarize substantial quantitative data are very important. Without a reliable compilation of such numbers, stories of change are too easily dismissed as being merely anecdotal. Statistics, which are presented before the stories, help build a credible environment for stakeholders to consider community views about change.

After reviewing overall statistics about project activities, stories of change are passed out. Once midlevel stakeholders have a chance to read the documented stories, the facilitator leads a brief discussion by asking a series of questions like these:

•What reported change surprised you?

•What were you pleased to hear?

•What additional information would you like?

•Where do you have doubts about the reliability of some of these reports?

•What do all of these changes add up to? What does it all mean?

•What effect do you think this will have on overall development within the district?

•What can various stakeholders do to support communities in their development process?

After a fifteenor twenty-minute discussion on these questions, participants are asked to select the four reported changes that they consider to be the most important. They too are asked to state their reasons about why they made the selections they did. The mayor and chairman of the municipal council in Topola reviewed progress reports from five communities on the day they discussed stories of change from Ovsiste (a total of twenty stories). They selected “confidence has been gained for launching new development activities” as the change they thought was the most important from Ovsiste. The reason for their selection was that “this shows that local action is now taking place as a continuous ongoing activity within the community” (Opto International AB. 2003).

Annual PM&E Meetings with Higher-Level Stakeholders Changes selected by midlevel stakeholders are then compiled so that the entire process can be repeated at the next level. The selection process ensures that a manageable number of stories, usually about twenty, are presented to a group of stakeholders at any one time. The highest level of stakeholders might eventually include senior managers and representatives from relevant donor organizations. PM&E meetings at this level usually occur only once a year. By the nature of the selection process, the changes filtering up through the different levels are the most significant across the entire program.

The entire selection process from CEP in Ethiopia is provided in Exhibit 24.3. It depicts the relationship of selected stories of change moving from level to level and

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is based on the PM&E in Ethiopia (Bergdall and Powell, 1996). Building from the bottom up, 288 stories of changes (4 per village) were identified by villagers during a single reporting period. They form the foundation for a review process through different levels of stakeholders. The four changes considered to be the most significant at one level are forwarded up to the next level.

Verification Stakeholders outside the community are also asked to choose reported changes, perhaps only one or two, which they feel need verification. This is especially important if any skepticism remains among these stakeholders. This was the case in Ethiopia, where most government officials firmly believed that “poor peasants” did not have the skills or the motivation to do development activities based on their “meager” resources. Verification visits not only help to build midlevel stakeholders’ confidence about the reliability of PM&E reports, they also provide an opportunity for these stakeholders to become directly familiar with events taking place in the field through face-to-face encounters. Similarly, when quantitative information is reported during community PM&E review meetings, physical inspections are made by program staff to verify the numbers reported. Awareness that midlevel stakeholders might eventually select one of their communities for a verification trip tends to ensure accuracy in quantitative data because most staff members want to avoid potential embarrassment.

Feedback After all stories of change have filtered their way up the PM&E system, feedback begins a journey back down through the chain by the use of memos and group discussions. Selections of the four significant changes made at the higher levels are reported to the communities during the next quarterly community review meetings. This provides a practical learning opportunity for local people in several ways. First, community members come to realize that their initiatives were recognized and that serious attention was paid to their grassroots efforts. Second, they learn what program effects higher-level stakeholders valued most and why. Third, they gain information about what other communities are doing, which enriches their own discussions as they plan future projects. The feedback process thereby closes the monitoring loop, tying together all levels of stakeholders into one unified conversation.