Are you a grant maker, manager or evaluator who must assess your work to
improve as well as be accountable for the use of resources and results?
Does the project, program or organization you fund, manage or evaluate
contend with substantial uncertainty about what to do and what will be
the results? Do you thus experience constant change and unexpected and
unforeseeable actors and factors in your intervention? Do you need to
know what you are achieving and how in real time? And therefore, do you
seek an alternative to conventional monitoring and evaluation of social
change results? If yes, then you are the audience for this book.
Beginning in 2002, working closely with co-evaluators and commissioners
of evaluations, the author developed Outcome Harvesting to enable
evaluators, grant makers, and managers to identify, formulate, verify,
and make sense of changes that interventions have influenced in a broad
range of cutting-edge innovation and development projects and programs
around the world. Over these years, he led Outcome Harvesting evaluative
exercises involving almost 500 non-governmental organizations, networks,
government agencies, funding agencies, community-based organizations,
research institutes and university programs. In over fifty evaluations,
with forty co-evaluators he has harvested thousands of outcomes on six
continents.
Outcome Harvesting has proven useful in evaluations of a great diversity
of initiatives: human rights advocacy, political, economic and
environmental advocacy, arts and culture, health systems, information
and communication technology, conflict and peace, water and sanitation,
taxonomy for development, violence against women, rural development,
organic agriculture, participatory democracy, waste management, public
sector reform, good governance, eLearning, social accountability, and
business competition, amongst others.
In this book, the author explains the steps of Outcome Harvesting and
how to customize them according to the nine underlying principles. He
shares his experience and gives practical advice on how to work with
Outcome Harvesting and remain true to its essential features.
