97 - Lessons learned using evaluation to weave stories about the results of a large, interdisciplinary multi-national development project

Abstract Information: Multi-disciplinary, multi-sector, and multi-national partnerships are essential to effective international development practice. However, partners often see the project through the lens of their discipline, sector, or prior experience. This leads to partners emphasizing one aspect of the project’s results over others or focusing on one area of impact to the detriment of the project as a whole. This session will use PERU-Hub, a recently funded partnership project between Peruvian and U.S. universities and research institutes, to illustrate this interwoven approach to story-telling. PERU-Hub is an education, research and agricultural development partnership-project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development based at La Molina University’s Regional Development Institute in the rainforest region of San Martin, Peru. The partnership includes three additional U.S. universities, as well as, an agriculture research and development non-profit based in South America. The round table session will present principles and engage attendees in sharing their experiences with the goal of further elaborating these ideas with additional examples from different contexts and developing additional learnings from the table’s collective knowledge and experience.

Relevance Statement: This session will be of interest to all evaluators that work with complex or multifaceted projects, include multidisciplinary teams and/or multiple stakeholder groups, work across cultures or contexts, or otherwise engage in activities defined by complexity. Multi-disciplinary, multi-sector, and multi-national partnerships are essential to effective international development practice. However, partners often see the project through the lens of their discipline, sector, or prior experience. This leads to partners emphasizing one aspect of the project’s results over others or focusing on one area of impact to the detriment of the project as a whole. Engaging all partners in the project’s monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) activities is crucial to maintaining focus on the project’s systemic impact. Telling the stories of multi-disciplinary, multi-sector, and multi-national partnership projects requires weaving many different threads of perspective, logic, information and values together to create a holistic program tapestry. This session will use a recently funded partnership project between Peruvian and U.S. universities and research institutes to illustrate this interwoven approach to story-telling. Drawing upon our experience as a MEL team for this project, we will share challenges, successes, and key lessons learned from our formative efforts at weaving cohesive stories from evidence produced by a diversity of project actors and stakeholders. Key lessons learned so far: 1. Story construction involves continuously weaving the logic chains, perspectives and values of various project actors and stakeholders; these threads are often in tension. Good weaving recognizes and harnesses this tension to tell compelling stories. 2. All project actors reflexively center their own work and perspective; good story-telling continually switches the perspectives that are centered and finds or develops patterns from the perspectives and evidence chains to create larger meaning. 3. All project actors need to see the goal–or the overall pattern for the tapestry–so that they can understand where their actions and threads contribute to the overall mission. In this kind of multi-disciplinary and multi-institution project, actors need to also understand and value the expertise and inputs of other project actors. This requires intentional co-creation of the mission and team development activities. These activities are essential for creating relationships and connectivity that allow for sustained coordination through mutual respect and trust. The round table session will present principles and engage attendees in sharing their experiences with the goal of further elaborating these ideas with additional examples from different contexts and developing additional learnings from the table’s collective knowledge and experience.