Presentation by Chris Roche, Director, Institute for Human Security and Social Change at La Trobe University.

1. Demonstrating Outcomes and Impact Across
Scales, A National Workshop
28 August
Chris Roche
Institute for Human Security and Social Change
La Trobe University

2. The Politics of Demonstrating Outcomes and Impact
Across Scales
1. Any form of monitoring,
reporting and particularly
evaluation is political.
2. There is a lot of evidence
to suggest that ignoring
politics and power
reinforces the status quo.
3. Happily there are a range
of ways of thinking and
working politically might
be applied to
demonstrating and
communicating impact
across scales.

3. The Politics of Demonstrating Outcomes and Impact
Across Scales
1. Any form of monitoring, reporting and particularly
evaluation is political.
• Demonstrating impact across scale involves particular politics
both inside organisations and between those in the aid chain.
These play out in terms of what methods, forms of evidence
and engagement process are valued and by whom.
• In general the more powerful at the top of the hierarchies of
aid and development seek certain forms of aggregated,
succinct, unambiguous data and those at the bottom usually
need something very different. Not taking this into account
when demonstrating impact across scales often means the
demands of the powerful are met at the expense of those
with less clout.

4. The Politics of Demonstrating Outcomes and Impact
Across Scales
2. There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that
ignoring politics, power relations, interests and
world views means that evaluations and reviews
are often ignored and/or simply reinforce existing
power relations and the status quo.
• If you ignore the reality of politics and power then you can
make unrealistic assumptions about the value of assessing
impact a cross scales i.e. that brute and well marshalled
evidence will effect the change you desire. The evidence
suggests that is not the way the world works or how decisions
are or indeed should be made.

5. The Politics of Demonstrating Outcomes and Impact
Across Scales
3. Happily there are a range of ways that those
trying to think and work politically in
development in general might be applied to
demonstrating and communicating impact across
scales i.e.
• Assess power relations of different actors;
• Develop a politically informed theory of change;
• Engage stakeholders and build coalitions of interests;
• Create space for dialogue, debate and contestation;
• Frame findings in ways that are politically savvy;
• Think about the governance of evidence and evaluation as
much as the right method.