Monitoring and evaluation - historical perspectives from Global South

[Rupesh Shah]

Hello all 

I was wondering it would be possible to tap into some collective intelligence. I am currently writing some new teaching materials for a masters programme in systems thinking in practice. One of the blocks of material is about co-designing interventions in monitoring and evaluation.

Anyway, as part of this material I wanted to introduce some wider perspectives on monitoring and evaluation as a formal discipline as well as an everyday practice (ie activities we do in our lifeworld).  One of the things I found is that the literature that exists (relatively limited) suggests that activity associated with formal monitoring and evaluation started in the field of education, suggesting it originated in the United Kingdom in the 1700s or perhaps a century earlier.

However, this seems a relatively limited view of history. Indeed a brief mental exercise tells me that the ancient early city states in the global south would have been engaged in some sort of monitoring activity as the administrators sought to manage the resources for the collective. So I have two questions: 

1. what inclusive history can be told of monitoring and evaluation practices? What do we know of practices associated with formal monitoring and evaluation in the Global South?  What do we know of monitoring and evaluation practices originating outside of the Western mind? 

2. relatedly, what are the alternative ways in which monitoring and evaluation is languaged outside of the English phrases?  Ie what are the non-English words that point to the same phenomenon and do they offer us alternative perspectives on it? 

For example, in Hindi/Gujarati/Bengali I believe the phrase for evaluation is 'mulyankan', which has two parts - 'mulya' (which I think translates as 'usage', 'qualities') and 'ankan' (notation) - that's about as far as my understanding goes though. But even this limited knowledge suggests some useful differences as compared with the English phrase and its etymology (evaluation | Search Online Etymology Dictionary (etymonline.com), where rather than 'noting qualities' there perhaps more of a sense of a 'valuing of strengths'.  

What other phrases are have been used to describe this phenomenon? Are there any that are not literal translations of the English words but have origins in other languages and cultures? And what do the different words bring to our understanding of the phenomenon? 

To explain some of my reasoning for these queries....it seems that one of the passions of the Western mind (to quote the historian Richard Tarnas) has been a well honed tendency to coolly separate things and reduce them down in order to assist individuals in power to take action over others with less power. It is likely that the contemporary history of monitoring and evaluation in formal projects has been influenced by this influence of the Western worldview such that current understandings and practices probably carry with them these echoes of these impulses towards reductionist, separative and single-perspective thinking and 'power over'.

There are lots of attempts to develop evaluation as a more holistic phenomenon. And I wonder if we can gain some more traction with these if we recognise how different worldviews - holistic, multi-perspectival, collaborative, creative and reflective - view the same phenomena. So my question is what wisdom can the contemporary field of M&E gain from engaging with other ways of thinking, talking and framing the same real world phenomena? 

rupesh