Using Adaptive M&E to Support Localisation

As the COVID-19 economic recovery progresses, and the world works towards resuming some sort of normalcy in our daily lives (and I get back to writing on this blog!), more emphasis needs to be placed on reflecting on what happened during COVID-19. Not just the stress of online schooling (oh boy), the working from home (video off as I was usually still in my pjs), and the loss of time with friends and family (I haven’t seen my family in 2.5 years… soon to be rectified!). No, what we need to focus on is what we have learned about our work – no matter what sector or what type of work you undertake, we all learned that business as usual (BAU) practices simply could not cope with the shock to the economic and social systems we live in.

In my line of work, and in my perspective, one of the biggest questions that has emerged is whether the development community is capable of truly improving the resilience of communities – whether to climate, disaster, economic or health shocks. I recently participated in the 7^th Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (GPDRR), and in particular the presentation of the ‘Because Resilience is Local’ report prepared by the SIAP SIAGA program, funded by the Australian Government. The report outlined several findings of the impact of COVID-19 on disaster management in the Asia and Pacific regions, not least of which was that COVID-19 forced international development actors to give significantly more control to COVID-19 response to national and community organisations due simply to logistic (travel restrictions) and health protocol (social distancing) reasons.

The report, and the discussion during the presentation of the findings and recommendations, examines the concept of ‘localisation.’ It is a concept which has featured prominently in international development discourse but has been accompanied by little practical action and guidance on what this looks like and how is works in practice. Simply funding local organisations but telling them what to do and how to do it is not localisation.

In fact, we have a long way to go to be able to better define what localisation IS, and I would posit that localisation will be different in different contexts. So, how do we know if our programs are sufficiently ‘localised’ and how can we measure our success in pursuing localisation?

One option, and I’m confident that there will be many, is to leverage the systems change approach to development – focus on evaluating outcomes, rather than on measuring specific targets. If we commit to ‘people centred development’ and put individuals and communities at the centre of resilience programming, we can co-design programs that assess what they need, what they want and what will work in a specific context based on the local resilience system. If we persist to measure resilience by ‘does community x have capacity y’ or ‘this is the type of training that communities need to be resilient’ then we will never achieve outcomes (or impact). Systems are constantly changing. So, if we are measuring targets, we are at risk of measuring the wrong thing because what was relevant 12 months ago may not be relevant now. But we CAN evaluate outcomes, co-designed and collaboratively evaluated with communities. Are they happy with the change they are seeing? Are they satisfied that the results meet their needs? Are they confident the results will be used by the community to continue to build resilience over time?

When we focus too much on measuring activity or output targets, we leave very little space for our programs to adapt and change to local context – the very reason for the push for localisation. Systems change approaches and a focus on the collaborative evaluation of outcomes using adapting M&E tools can create the necessary space for organisations to make a concerted push to support localisation and the empowerment of communities and community resilience.