Strengthening meaningful participation and empowerment of citizens and improving the quality of governance at the local level are essential for effective poverty reduction. This Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) guidance paper explores how a Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) process can enhance participation, empowerment and governance in World Bank-supported projects and programmes. PM&E is not constructed as an instrument for ‘control’ but focuses on improving the quality and direction of joint development initiatives and local governance.
PM&E is about strengthening primary stakeholders’ involvement as active participants in interventions. It is about encouraging them to take the lead in tracking and analysing progress towards jointly agreed results and deciding on corrective action. This approach contributes to demand-led planning and decision-making, and improved accountability, when effective communication and feedback loops are in place with programmes and agencies.
Governance is about the process and institutions by which authority and control are exercised. It can be assessed in terms of four qualities: (1) Efficiency and effectiveness with which institutions, rules, and systems operate; (2) Equity of outcomes; (3) Exercise of power, including accountability mechanisms; and (4) Quality of stakeholder interactions.
A PM&E process can enhance local governance and participation in World Bank-supported projects and programmes. For local governance, PM&E can:
- Enhance efficiency and effectiveness – PM&E processes can contribute to results-based management by improving policymaking, facilitating adaptive management, enhancing efficiency of resource use and promoting staff motivation.
- Improve the exercise of power – some characteristics of the exercise of power are openness, transparency, responsiveness, predictability and accountability. Gathering and sharing information and dialogue are key features of PM&E processes, which contribute to openness and transparency.
- Enhance equity of outcomes – ensuring equity of outcomes requires commitment of all stakeholder groups to question the existing distribution of services. It involves an assessment into the responsiveness of projects, service providers, and/or local government as perceived by groups of (potential) users who tend to be marginalised or socially excluded.
- Enhance stakeholder interactions – usually there are multiple stakeholders involved in local development. Well-structured PM&E systems may help communities and civil society organisation to develop partnerships with projects, office bearers and other stakeholders.
For integrating PM&E into programmes and projects that work with large numbers of communities and micro-projects, a number of factors need to be considered:
- Inviting primary stakeholders to engage in a PM&E process only makes sense when it is focused on activities that are largely within the realm of action of these actors.
- PM&E can contribute to strengthening local governance in multi-stakeholder processes. Again, before deciding on setting up a PM&E process in a multi-stakeholder setting, an analysis needs to be made of the willingness and ability of all key stakeholders to participate and to respond to outcomes.
- Policymakers have to be persuaded of the value of engaging in a PM&E process before they will support its integration in a programme. Therefore, it is important to demonstrate to policymakers the value and feasibility of PM&E for the programme under consideration.
- Linking PM&E into project design and budget. Ideally, PM&E should be presented as an explicit part of the overall mission and strategies. The project design should further set out the purpose and scope of the PM&E process, and establish the basis for effective participation by stakeholders.
