Interpretive and ethnographic perspectives: Alternative approaches to monitoring and evaluation practice

This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book concerns the challenges faced in knowing how best to intervene to improve health and social development. It offers the reader how interpretive and ethnographic approaches to monitoring and evaluation can be used to deliver successful programmes in health and social development. The book illustrates how these approaches can enhance current monitoring and evaluation. It demonstrates how these methods can be used at three different stages of the programme and policy cycle: programme design, including needs assessment and baseline survey research; programme delivery, including research to monitor the delivery of particular programme activities, and outputs and outcomes arising from these; and programme evaluation, including research to examine impact and change resulting from programmes. The book explores the potential of interpretive and ethnographic methods to improve understanding and make a difference to communities on the ground. Two recent developments hold the potential to transcend these difficulties and to lead to important changes in the way in which the effects of health and social development programming are understood. First, there is growing interest in ways of monitoring programmes and assessing impact that are more grounded in the realities of practice than many of the results-based methods currently utilised. Second, there are calls for the greater use of interpretive and ethnographic methods in programme design, monitoring and evaluation. Responding to these concerns, this book illustrates the potential of interpretative methods to aid understanding and make a difference in real peoples lives. Through a focus on individual and community perspectives, and locally-grounded explanations, the methods explored in this book offer a potentially richer way of assessing the relationships between intent, action and change in health and social development in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.