Participatory Learning and Action: Monitoring and Evaluation and Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (Essays in Honour of Robert Chambers)

This book is a comprehensive treatise on 'Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation'. It brings out the critical difference between Traditional Monitoring and Evaluation using 'PLA Tools' and Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation while focusing attention on both these two monitoring and evaluation systems. It discusses what is 'participatory monitoring and evaluation' (PM&E), steps in PM&E and some of the tools that may be used. It demonstrates the use of PLA tools in the evaluation of an integrated rural development project, in impact assessment villages hits by disasters, in evaluating (in the orthodox sense) developmental organization, in evaluating a primarily agricultural development project, and in 'participatory Evaluation' of a system of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation established for housing projects in Nepal and Sri Lanka. The book then is a combination of conceptual specification of PM&E, four case Studies from India of evaluation of different kinds of development project) where participatory tools have been used for traditional evaluation and two case studies on participatory evaluation from Nepal and Sri Lanka. The book will be of immense use in understanding Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation on the one part vis-a-vis Monitoring and Evaluation using PLA tools on the other part. Readers will get a glimpse of how the two systems of evaluation can be carried out in different kinds of projects and environments. It will be of great value to development workers, development organizations, international donors, government departments engaged in M&E and serious students of development economics.