https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/best-practice-and-linear-thinking-favour-autocracies-so-what-do-we-do-instead/ How active citizens and effective states can change the world Thu, 13 Jul 2017 06:57:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.15 https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/best-practice-and-linear-thinking-favour-autocracies-so-what-do-we-do-instead/#comment-68858 Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:24:46 +0000 http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=20724#comment-68858 Current Aid Design and Evaluation Favor Autocracies. How Do We Change That? I think, unwittingly, the answer is your title. The issue is that development is design and evaluation biased and it misses monitoring totally (well, maybe not totally, but almost totally). As to make a point, your article does not even use the term. There is a trend that monitoring is being purged from development. If we had a better understand of monitoring, we would not be trapped in the cycle of trying to prove development by logic models, RCT and p-values. Monitoring is a critical part of understanding complex systems but in development it is marginalised to just being a management function. In monitoring, we already have a natural and real method of learning about development – one that we can get close to our communities and understand them. This is what is currently missing. It is time to get it back and applied monitoring remains the best book in the participatory development filedraw. We just have to learn to read it again before development loses this art forever.

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