ABSTRACT:
"It
is increasingly common for complex social, economic and
environmental policy concerns to be delivered via funded
community-based projects. A project’s contribution is typically
monitored and evaluated relative to pre-defined
outcomes, supported by a set of indicators. Available
research suggests that when judged against such criteria,
the performance of many funded international developmental and
community-based sustainability (CBS) projects are variable, with
evidence suggesting that changes elicited are negligible in
duration, type, and scale. However, evaluating project performance
relative to pre-defined outcomes may overlook the
practical learning accumulated
by actors in realising key objectives under conditions afforded by the
operational context. To address this gap, developmental
evaluation (DE) foregrounds and supports project practitioner
learning and innovation under dynamic, complex, and uncertain
operating conditions. Applying the DE focus on project actor
learning and innovation, the present research thematically
analyses how practitioners in a funded CBS case study project make sense
of their practice. Despite its explicit focus on learning
however, DE has not articulated a coherent cognitive
paradigm, and a contribution of the present study is to
equip DE with a conceptual architecture drawn from the enactive
cognitive science paradigm, rooted in an explicit
accounting of complexity. Using this base, a prototype DE framework was designed and provisionally field-tested in the form of a set of prompts to be used with CBS practitioners to augment traditional monitoring and evaluation activities. This framework is intended to support practitioners in surfacing and capturing second-order learning about their practices and to explore opportunities for innovative responses to dynamic complex operational conditions.
Recommendations are offered for further research and how these findings might be incorporated into future CBS design and funding considerations."
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