Ad lib comments on "Going to scale with partnership"

Rick Davies, Wednesday 2^nd April 2003

A topic session within INTRAC's 5th International Evaluation Conference: Measurement, Management, and Accountability?, KFK Conference Centre, The Netherlands. Details available at http://www.intrac.org/Intrac/5thEvaluationConference_en.html

These comments are made in lieu of a paper I was expecting to present. That paper is not ready because it was to be based on field work in Bangladesh, which has been delayed because of changes in programme planning priorities in the organisation concerned.

• We need to move our thinking from partnerships to relationships. So we can look at a wider set of relationships with a less constricted set of expectations.

• We need to move from thinking about relationships in terms of dyads (individual relationships between ourselves and another organisation), to thinking about the networks of relationships we are involved in, including the connections between the various organisations who are connected with us (or lack thereof).
  • E.g. In Vietnam and Bangladesh there are relatively few linkages between different projects that are funded by DFID. Consequence: little cross learning in precisely the setting where the most learning might be expected.

• We need to see evaluations and evaluators in network rather than stand alone terms.
  • The Memorial Fund UK will now require all evaluations to start with a literature review to identify prior evaluations that are relevant to the project about to be evaluated, and the content and process lessons that can be learned from those evaluations. (This will also be a pre-test of the evaluators’ skills)
    • Network studies (Kauffman, 1994, Barabasi, 2001) show that a relatively small number of links between individual actors can soon lead to the whole set of actors being inter-connected in one network. If this is the case with evaluations that are linked to prior evaluations then there will be some possibility of incremental learning on a large scale, without a centralised coordinating body.
  • UNICEF has been very active in promoting country level associations of evaluators, especially in Africa
    • These are means by which relevant prior evaluations can be found. They contain information about the location of information.

• We need to move from a focus on activities to a focus on relationships. Relationships are larger units of analysis than activities. Activities happen within relationships. Therefore planning and M&E at meso and macro level should be couched in terms of changes in relationships, and networks of relationships. Then at the more micro level the focus can move to activities.
  • Examples:
    • DFID B’desh Rural Livelihood Programme milestones will be focused on the most important expected changes in the types of relationships DFID will have with various groups within B’desh. Not just abstract types of rural livelihood related activities, disembodied from any actor implementing them.
    • High level objectives should be couched in terms of changes in the behaviour of parties our organisation has some direct relationship with. So DFID’s performance should not be measured by reductions in infant mortality, but in terms of changes in the numbers of countries it works with whose governments can report x level reductions in infant mortality.

(These notes were written up on April 10th, 2003)

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