Introduction

The purpose of monitoring is simple: to improve programme implementation and strengthen the prospects of lasting impact. Yet the development and humanitarian aid community has long given monitoring less attention and fewer resources than evaluation (Ticehurst, 2013; Hall & Rogers, 2021). At times, this creates the impression that evaluating aid programmes is more challenging, and more deserving, than delivering them.

Perhaps this neglect is not surprising. Monitoring is often treated as a reporting function that describes performance rather than explaining it. However, thoughtful monitoring offers a different approach. It aims to simplify learning and adaptation by using language that ordinary people can understand.

This ambition challenges a common tendency within the evaluation community. The current fashion of adding more letters to “M&E”, such as L for Learning, A for Accountability and R for Results, often appears to be more for affect than effect. It can reflect a limited understanding of M&E and its history, both among those who introduce these additions and those who consider them revealing or helpful.

This article explores how thoughtful approaches to monitoring can help managers resolve the uncertainties they face during implementation. Such uncertainties are common when teams navigate complex and unpredictable environments in pursuit of results. In these settings, some of the most important factors are unknown or cannot easily be measured. Assumptions, for example, resist prediction but can matter as much as, or more than, indicators from a management perspective.

“It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—a costly myth.” — W. Edwards Deming, 1982

The primary audience is managers and people working as M&E specialists in organisations and programmes, although whether one person can truly specialise in both functions is open to question, given the different skills and experience they require. The aim is to provoke conversation about monitoring approaches that improve the relevance and performance of development and humanitarian aid. In other words, approaches that are thoughtful.

What makes monitoring thoughtful?

More thoughtful approaches to monitoring:

1. Provide a remedy for an obsession with indicators and results measurement. There is more to monitoring than either.
2. Evolve as information needs and the priorities of client beneficiaries change.
3. Respond to managers’ needs while treating client beneficiaries, their goals and their cultures as paramount. They legitimise development and humanitarian aid, while their indigenous knowledge systems provide important lessons.
4. Generate evidence-based lessons that justify adaptation and strengthen accountability to client beneficiaries.
5. Reflect the complexity of the operating environment. No single monitoring approach or system fits every situation (Snowden, 2020).

Many challenges associated with M&E are neither methodological nor technical. Instead, they are organisational and managerial. They concern the purpose, positioning and ownership of monitoring.

Monitoring is primarily a learning function. Therefore, it must be integrated into a programme’s or organisation’s structures and processes, including management, planning, financing, operations and decision-making. However, the ubiquitous M&E team often operates in parallel to these functions. Sometimes, a third party performs the role. Correcting this separation is more important than the frequently cited need to create synergies between monitoring and evaluation.

The four core questions thoughtful approaches to monitoring seek to answer can be summarised as:

Monitoring and evaluation are different functions

This article was inspired by the idea that navigating complexity and allowing solutions to emerge can be a simple process of trial and error (Harford, 2011). Complex problems seldom require sophisticated or expertly designed solutions (Rondinelli, 1983).

For the purposes of this discussion, monitoring and evaluation differ in four important ways:

1. Main purpose: Monitoring supports continuous assessment and learning by the programme team. Evaluation provides periodic assessment, accountability and learning, often for the donor.
2. Primary users: Managers are the main users of monitoring information, while donors are often the main users of evaluation findings.
3. Main responsibility: Monitoring belongs primarily to the programme team; evaluation is more commonly commissioned or led by donors.
4. Comparative analysis: Monitoring examines how different client beneficiaries experience and respond to support, and how this varies over time, outputs, people and places. Evaluation is relatively more concerned with comparing those who received support with those who did not, as well as comparing programmes.

What is thoughtful monitoring?

Thoughtful monitoring develops communication processes within and beyond programmes so that teams can understand clients’ needs and responses. In turn, this makes programmes more accountable to the people they support.

It also creates space for frontline staff to listen to and learn from one another. This matters because they often provide support in difficult environments and work with hard-to-reach clients. Organisational silence is one of the most significant barriers to an organisation’s ability to adapt and change (Morrison & Milliken, 2000).

Ultimately, thoughtful monitoring means finding practical ways to remain accountable to low-income and vulnerable people, neglected communities and struggling institutions. It involves listening, assessing how experiences differ, sharing interpretations and taking appropriate action. This begins with the baseline and continues throughout implementation.

Seven foundations of thoughtful monitoring

Thoughtful monitoring treats the client, not the donor or shareholder, as paramount. It helps managers embrace uncertainty, navigate towards success or failure, learn from what happens and adapt accordingly.

This goes beyond giving primacy to beneficiaries’ voices, recognising complexity or asking reflective questions. A thoughtful approach is also mindful of seven foundations:

1. Begin with decisions, not tools. Ask how monitoring can help the people implementing the programme. Explore how implementation works, what information managers need, which decisions remain uncertain and when those decisions must be made. Do this before beginning with a theory of change or results framework.
2. Integrate monitoring into existing systems. A monitoring and evaluation system should not be confused with a data collection plan developed solely from a results framework or theory of change. Monitoring should be embedded in existing processes and responsibilities.
3. Match the operating environment. The nature and pace of monitoring should reflect the complex and uncertain context in which the programme operates. This includes creating rapid feedback loops and considering what they mean for decisions and operations.
4. Pay attention to assumptions. In complex systems, the most important information may initially be unknown. Teams should research key assumptions and revisit them periodically. Otherwise, they may discover too late that an assumed result in the framework was never realistic.
5. Value indigenous knowledge. Monitoring can learn from and add material value to indigenous knowledge systems, many of which embrace complexity more readily than mainstream monitoring approaches.
6. Balance accountability. Programmes should be as accountable to the people they support as they are to those who fund them. This means adapting in response to what is learned and treating people as participants in conversations that matter to them, not as objects of interviews that matter mainly to the M&E team or donor (Salmen, 1989).
7. Listen to those delivering support. Frontline staff need opportunities to share their successes and challenges. Senior management, in turn, must listen and use these insights to improve both the support provided and how it is delivered.

Avoiding the pitfalls of a separate monitoring system

For decades, donors and managers have aspired to make monitoring “part of the team” by connecting learning with action (Casley & Kumar, 1988; Guijt, 2008; Patton, 2010; Pritchett et al., 2013). Yet the continued presence of discrete M&E teams suggests that this ambition remains elusive. Their separation can reinforce the divide between monitoring and management.

The growth of third-party monitoring has deepened this isolation. In many cases, the term is itself a contradiction. Similarly, the recent popularity of MEL partnerships can represent an abdication of management responsibility, although it has certainly created a profitable line of work for M&E companies.

Therefore, the first question managers and their teams should ask is whether they need a monitoring or evaluation professional on the team at all. A central tenet of thoughtful monitoring is that the starting assumption should be no.

The case for a dedicated professional or team should depend on two questions:

• Do managers and those delivering the programme have the capacity to perform the monitoring function?
• Do existing decision-making, operational and lesson-learning processes support assessment, listening and learning?

If a dedicated person or team is necessary, managers should guard against isolation, overdependence and the production of evidence that is irrelevant to management.

Making monitoring useful again

Thoughtful monitoring has applications across development and humanitarian programmes, including education, health, governance, private-sector development and agriculture.

However, it is not a fixed recipe. Organisations can adopt its distinguishing features à la carte. Many programmes will have the need or capacity to begin with only their highest-priority areas. They can then add other elements as their needs evolve, or decide not to.

With the seven foundations above in mind, managers and M&E specialists should reflect on whether their current approach produces information that supports real decisions. Does it create space for listening? Does it help teams learn and adapt? Most importantly, does it make programmes more accountable and responsive to the people they exist to support?

That is how monitoring becomes thoughtful, and useful again.

An earlier version of this article first appeared on the author’s Substack.