Practicing Safe Monitoring and Evaluation in the 21st Century

By Stephen Porter. Adapted from the original post published here.

Monitoring and evaluation practice can do harm. It can harm:

• the environment by prioritizing economic gain over species that have no voice
• people who are invisible to us when we are in a position of power
• by asking for information that can then be misused.

In the quest for understanding What Works, the focus is often too narrowly on program goals rather than the safety of people. A classic example in the environmental domain is the use of DDT: “promoted as a wonder-chemical, the simple solution to pest problems large and small. Today, nearly 40 years after DDT was banned in the U.S., we continue to live with its long-lasting effects.” The original evaluation of its effects had failed to identify harm and emphasized its benefits. Only when harm to the ecosystem became more apparent was evidence presented in Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. We should not have to wait for failure to be so apparent before evaluating for harm.

Join me, Veronica Olazabal, Rodney Hopson, Dugan Fraser and Linda Raftree, for a session on “Institutionalizing Doing no Harm in Monitoring and Evaluation” on Thursday, Nov 14, 2019, 8-9am, Room CC M100 H, at the American Evaluation Association Conference in Minneapolis.

Ethical standards have been developed for evaluators, which are discussed at conferences and included in professional training. Yet institutional monitoring and evaluation practices still struggle to fully get to grips with the reality of harm in the pressure to get results reported. If we want monitoring and evaluation to be safer for the 21^st Century we need to shift from training and evaluator-to-evaluator discussions to changing institutional practices.

At a workshop convened by Oxfam and the Rockefeller Foundation in 2019, we sought to identify core issues that could cause harm and get to grips with areas where institutions need to change practices. The workshop brought together partners from UN agencies, philanthropies, research organizations and NGOs. This meeting sought to give substance to issues. It was noted by a participant that though the UNEG Norms and Standards and UNDP’s evaluation policy are designed to make evaluation safe, in practice there is little consideration given to capturing or understanding the unintended or perverse consequences of programs or policies. The workshop explored this and other issues and identified three areas of practice that could help to reframe institutional monitoring and evaluation in a practical manner.

1. Data rights, privacy and protection: 

In working on rights in the 21^st Century, data and Information are some of the most important ‘levers’ pulled to harm and disadvantage people. Oxfam has had a Responsible Data in Program policy in place since 2015 goes some way towards recognizing this.But we know we need to more fully implement data privacy and protection measures in our work.

At Oxfam, work is continuing to build a rights-based approach which already includes aligned confederation-wide Data Protection Policies, implementation of responsible data management policy and practices and other tools aligned with the Responsible Data Policy and European Privacy law, including a responsible data training pack.

Planned and future work includes stronger governance, standardized baseline measures of privacy & information security, and communications/guidance/change management. This includes changes in evaluation protocols related to how we assess risk to the people we work with, who gets access to the data and ensure consent for how the data will be used.

This is a start, but consistent implementation is hard and if we know we aren’t competent at operating the controls within our reach, it becomes more difficult in how we call others out if they are causing harm when they misuse theirs.

2. Harm prevention lens for evaluation

The discussion highlighted that evaluation has not often sought to understand the harm of practices or interventions. When they do, however, the results can powerfully shed new light on an issue. A case that starkly illustrates potential under-reporting is that of the UN Military Operation in Liberia (UNMIL). UNMIL was put in place with the aim “to consolidate peace, address insecurity and catalyze the broader development of Liberia”. Traditionally we would evaluate this objective. Taking a harm lens we may evaluate the sexual exploitation and abuse related to the deployment. The reporting system highlights low levels of abuse, 14 from 2007 – 2008 and 6 in 2015. A study by Beber, Gilligan, Guardado and Karim, however, estimated through representative randomized survey that more than half of eighteen- to thirty-year-old women in greater Monrovia have engaged in transactional sex and that most of them (more than three-quarters, or about 58,000 women) have done so with UN personnel, typically in exchange for money.

Changing evaluation practice should not just focus on harm in the human systems, but also provide insight in the broader ecosystem. Institutionally there needs to be championship for identifying harm within and through monitoring and evaluation practice and changes in practice.

3. Strengthening safeguarding and evaluation skills

We need to resource teams appropriately so they have the capacity to be responsive to harm and reflective on the potential for harm. This is both about tools and procedures and conceptual frames.

Tools and procedures can include, for example:

• Codes-of-conduct that create a safe environment for reporting issues
• Transparent reporting lines to safeguarding/safe programming advisors
• Training based on actual cases
• Safe data protocols (see above)

All of these fall by the way-side, however, if the values and concepts that guide implementation are absent. Rodney Hopson at the workshop, drawing on environmental policy and concepts of ecology, presented a frame to increasing evaluators’ usefulness in complex ecologies where safeguarding issues are prevalent, that emphasizes:

• Relationships – the need to identify and relate to key interests, interactions, variables and stakeholders amid dynamic and complex issues in an honest manner that is based on building trust.
• Responsibilities – acting with propriety, doing what is proper, fair, right, just in evaluation against standards.
• Relevance – being accurate and meaningful technically, culturally and contextually.

Safe monitoring and evaluation in the 21^st Century does not just seek ‘What Works’ and will need to be relentless at looking at ‘How we can work differently?’. This includes us understanding connectivity in harm between human and environmental systems. The three areas noted here are a start of a conversation and a challenge to institutions to think more about what it means to be safe in monitoring and evaluation practice.

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Planning to attend the American Evaluation Association Conference this week? Join us for the session “Institutionalizing Doing no Harm in Monitoring and Evaluation” on Thursday, Nov 14, 2019, from 8- 9:00 AM) in room CC M100 H.

Panelists will discuss ideas to better address harm in regards to: (i) harm identification and mitigation in evaluation practice; (ii) responsible data practice evaluation in complex ecologies, (iii) understanding harm in an international development context, and (iv) evaluation in complex ecologies.

The panel will be chaired by  Veronica M Olazabal, (Senior Advisor & Director, Measurement, Evaluation and Organizational Performance, The Rockefeller Foundation) , with speakers Stephen Porter (Evaluation Strategy Advisor, World Bank), Linda Raftree (Independent Consultant, Organizer of MERL Tech), Dugan Fraser (Prof & Director CLEAR-AA – University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) and Rodney Hopson (Prof of Evaluation, Department of Ed Psych, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). View the full program here: https://lnkd.in/g-CHMEj