Monitoring and evaluation in a changing world: A Southern African perspective on the skills needed for a new approach

African Evaluation Journal

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Monitoring and evaluation in a changing world: A Southern African perspective on the skills needed for a new approach
 
Creator Rosenberg, Eureta Kotschy, Karen
 
Subject Evaluation Evaluation; Skills; Competencies; Technical; Relational; Transformational; Training
Description Background:As science and modern technology have brought many advances, we have also come to overshoot planetary boundaries, while still falling short of development goals to eradicate poverty and inequality. A growing recognition of the complexity of development problems and contexts calls for new framings, including a new approach to monitoring and evaluation (ME) as one of the mechanisms by which modern societies aim to steer towards a more sustainable future. New approaches to ME mean new skills for the ME practitioner.Objectives: This article proposed a framing for ME skills, comprising of technical, relational and transformational (T-R-T) competences.Method: Adapted from the literature, this competence framework was tested in a broader learning needs assessment and then applied retrospectively to author’s experience in developmental evaluations in complex social–ecological contexts in southern Africa.Results: The emerging insights were that not only technical competence is needed, but also relational competence that goes beyond interpersonal skills, to enable the production and uptake of evaluation findings. In addition, the limitations of mainstream ME methods in the face of complexity seemed to create a need for ‘transformational’ competence, which included evaluators’ ability to develop credible ME alternatives.Conclusion: The T-R-T framework helped to advance the notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills and expanded on existing ME competence frameworks. Recommendations included a call for innovative educational and professional development approaches to develop relational and transformational competencies, in addition to training for technical competence.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor United Nations Institute for Training and Research Rhodes University
Date 2020-10-23
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Retrospective case analyses
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/aej.v8i1.472
 
Source African Evaluation Journal; Vol 8, No 1 (2020); 10 pages 2306-5133 2310-4988
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/article/view/472/877 https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/article/view/472/876 https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/article/view/472/878 https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/article/view/472/875
 
Coverage South Africa Current N/A
Rights Copyright (c) 2020 Eureta Rosenberg, Karen Kotschy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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