Regional Collaboration Stewardship Across Boundaries

Monitoring Outcomes

Measure progress, learn as you go, and adapt as needed.

In the process of translating regional visions into actions, two important tasks emerge: (1) ensuring that the individuals and groups involved are honoring their commitments; and (2) noticing how the world changes. Evaluation builds on the information gleaned from monitoring and focuses on the questions of whether a regional effort is having the desired effect, and whether the strategy of action should be modified to reflect changes.

Monitoring and evaluating progress is a process of learning from experience, and provides the political momentum for a group of people to follow through on difficult problems, and to transfer the social, political, and intellectual capital generated from one project to another.

Why Monitor and Evaluate?

  • To ensure participants live up to their agreed-upon roles and responsibilities.
  • To help adjust, adapt and improve your regional effort.
    • Learn from experience and adapt activities accordingly (adaptive management).
    • Improve on-the-ground success in the face of inevitable uncertainty and change.
  • To maintain and build support by measuring progress and documenting success.
    • Address participants' concerns about process and outcomes.
    • Engage new people.
    • Enhance opportunities for funding.
  • To enhance your ability to do better next time.

What Happens When Regions Don't Evaluate?

  • They spend time and money doing things that may not cause the intended change.
  • They do lots of good things, but no one knows about them. This limits the effectiveness and sustainability of the work.
  • Sense of purpose and direction may become distorted.
  • They can't document or prove that they succeeded.

What to Measure?

Most theories and methods of evaluation suggest that it is valuable to measure both outcome and process factors, as summarized here:

Outcomes
  • Are you achieving your objectives or interests?
  • Are you doing better than you would have through your best alternative to regional collaboration?
  • Are the outcomes wise – i.e., based on the best available information?
  • Can the outcomes be implemented? Are they politically, technically, and financially feasible?
Process
    Did everyone who wanted to participate have a meaningful opportunity to do so?
  • Was the process efficient relative to your alternatives?
  • Did you learn something from the experience?
  • Did people build trust and relationships?

Approaches to Evaluation

The standards for evaluating regional collaboration vary widely. Some observers argue that collaboration (including regional collaboration) should be evaluated against the goals and aspirations of the participants. Others claim that evaluation should focus on whether collaboration does a better job than alternative processes. The idea here is to compare collaboration against its real-world alternatives, and to assess what would most likely happen if there were no regional collaboration. Still other critics suggest that collaboration should be evaluated against some idealistic theory about participatory democracy, regional governance, or some other relevant theory or preconceived outcome (e.g., did collaboration improve the environment?).

The following links provide alternative methods to evaluate the progress of regional projects or programs: