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An experiment by an NGO in Bangladesh.
By Rick Davies. 1996
INTRODUCTION
This chapter describes what is believed to be an innovative approach to project monitoring, developed in co-operation with the Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB) in 1994. A participatory monitoring system was developed in the course of developing an evolutionary perspective on learning within organisations. The design involved the deliberate abandonment of the use of "indicators", a central concept in orthodox approaches to monitoring. Instead, the focus of the system is on the identification of significant change as perceived and interpreted by the various participants. It relies on the use of qualitative, not quantitative, information. The approach is inductive, extracting meaning out of events that have already taken place, not deductive, making assumptions about future events. The focus of the system is flexible and adaptive, not fixed. Although the epistemology embedded in the monitoring system is more post-modernist than positivist the system has proved to be of value to CCDB and has been continued and expanded in its scale of operation since 1994.
The first section of this chapter outlines the methodology by detailing the steps involved in its operation. This is followed by a summary of the state of the monitoring system as of March 1995, a year after the first steps were taken to establish it. A series of contrasts are then made between this participatory monitoring system (PMS) and what are described as orthodox approaches to project monitoring. Questions are then raised about how to evaluate monitoring systems. Finally, an interim conclusion about the value of the experiment is stated, and two issues for further exploration are identified.
13 page paper
Available on the web at
http://www.swan.ac.uk/cds/rd/ccdb.htm
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