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International development Page Edits:

The MDGs served a successful framework to guide international development efforts, having achieved progress on some of the 8 goals. For example, by 2015 the extreme poverty rate had already been cut into half. Other targets achieved include access to safe drinking water, malaria, and gender equality in schooling. Yet, some scholars have argued that the MDGs lack the critical perspectives required to alleviate poverty and structures of inequality, reflected in the serious lags to achieving numerous other goals.

As the MDG era came to an end, 2015 marked the year that the United Nations General Assembly adopted a new agenda for development. Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon referred to this as a "defining moment in history" calling on states to "act in solidarity". Succeeding the MDG agenda, 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were created, with 169 indicators. UN resolution 70/1 adopted on September 25, 2015 was titled "Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development", solidifying 17 new goals that had been in motion since 2014. The goals came into force in January 2016, focusing on areas of climate change, economic inequality, democracy, poverty, and peacebuilding.

Although the SDGs were built on the foundation of the MDGs, there are some key differences in both processes. Before adoption, unlike the MDGs, the SDGs had been in discussion for months, involving civil society actors, NGOs, as well as an opening summit involving intergovernmental negotiations. The new global development agenda places a greater emphasis on collective action, combining the efforts of multiple stakeholders to increase the sustainability of the goals. This emphasis on sustainability has also led to more cross-sector partnerships, and combined international efforts across areas of environmental, social, cultural, political, and economic development.

Participatory evaluation Page Edits :

Participatory Evaluation in International Development:

Participatory evaluation in development, is part of the new wave of grassroots development in which local stakeholders have a more valuable role in the development process. Participatory evaluation methods, in comparison to more mainstream evaluation practices, make space for input from locals who have a specialized and more personal set of knowledge on the community's needs. In this context, the term "locals" can include local governments, local non-governmental organizations, local civil society organizations, and local citizens, among various other actors. In the past, evaluation methods in development have been more quantitative in nature, placing more importance on donor-needs and measurable indicators, but participatory evaluation creates more room for multiple stakeholders to provide much needed input. This strategy can increase the overall accuracy and complexity of monitoring and evaluation in development projects, generating more sustainable outcomes. The key idea is that stakeholders, meaning all groups with both an interest and that are affected by the project, are given an opportunity to provide feedback. The hope is then that the feedback will be implemented in good faith.

Participatory evaluation is an extension of participatory development theory. Participatory evaluation methods have been used at all scales of development projects, including in small-scale businesses as well as large-scale projects. Within these contexts, stakeholders are involved at all levels of the development process, including planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation.

Other benefits to applying participatory evaluation to international development include an increase in local ownership, higher empowerment rates for all involved parties, more diverse analysis methods, increase in accuracy to local realities, improvements in impacts of development efforts. Participatory evaluation has also been applied beyond international development aid, and having been involved in humanitarian intervention and aid efforts thus increasing the transparancy, accountability, and opportunities to learn.

Depending on contexts, participatory evaluation methodologies can vary. Projects can involve active stakeholder participation at every step of the evaluation process; they can control the evaluation process while keeping stakeholders informed and discussing when needed; or projects can train and prep stakeholders to take on development initiatives by learning throughout the evaluation process.

Within the international development context, participatory evaluation is not without challenges. Since stakeholders are such a crucial element to participatory evaluation, a major challenge to this method is ensuring that the right groups have been included in evaluation methods. Further still, the challenge is identifying what practices and data collection methods work best when collaborating with stakeholders, especially when working with multiple stakeholder groups that have clashing values and objectives. Another challenge to implementing participatory evaluation methods is maintaining the balance in power dynamics between different stakeholders of the development project, including the evaluation team itself. As part of project teams, evaluation teams hold an authoritative position and these evaluators have the potential to hold more power than local stakeholders. Ultimately, this power balance can be reflected by skewed results.