Politics of Evidence - an abstract

I have submitted a conference report on the "Politics of Evidence" Conference in Brighton (April 2013) to a German evaluation journal. Check this blog for an announcement of its publication date! Meanwhile, here's an abstract in English:
More than 100 specialists participated in the ‘Politics of Evidence’ conference at the Institute of Development Studies in April 2013. The main theme was the growing tendency to tie funding for international development and transformative initiatives to the use of pre-defined instruments (‘evidence artifacts’) for effectiveness and impact assessment – and how to deal with this trend.
The participants were in favour of well-informed planning and robust monitoring as a source of information for effective project steering, and as way to expand the knowledge base. However, when the use of a narrow spectrum of specific instruments becomes an obligation, distortion and loss of effectiveness may occur. A key conclusion was the call for rigorous relevance and relevant rigour, i.e.: the main criterion for the choice of instruments for project monitoring should be the extent to which they generate practical use.
---
Here is the link to the conference and to the papers delivered by Rosalind Eyben and Brendan Whitty respectively. (Click on the names to get to the paper.) Additional resources are available on the Politics of Evidence site under "Resources".
By the way, the notes of a somewhat smaller but equally interesting event at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Brighton are also available on the web now. The Centre for Development Impact has hosted an "Impact Innovation and Learning Event: Towards a Research and Practice Agenda for the Future". Click on the title to get to their web-site, which includes the keynote speakers' power point presentations as well as a list of 18 action points. I also recommend the site of the IDS Centre for Development Impact, a fairly new group that brings together academic research and evaluation practice. To be continued...

Quotes from the "Politics of Evidence" Conference

In late April, the "Politics of Evidence" conference brought together (at the IDS in Brighton) development and evaluation practitioners from a rich mix of professional backgrounds and countries. Some of the papers presented have been available on the internet, such as Rosalynd Eyben's article on the The power of results and evidence artefacts. Eyben's paper is about tools initially designed to stimulate critical thinking which have mutated into instruments of confusion: For example, the log-frame was built to encourage people to reflect on the assumptions behind their "project logic" - but in most contemporary versions, the "assumptions" column has disappeared.

Coming soon: Critique of results and evidence artefacts

Next week I'll attend the Big Push Forward conference at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Brighton. For those who can't make it there, a few interesting papers are already available on the web (for example Carrots and sticks: Results and evidence artefacts and their effects | The Big Push Forward).
The final plenary session will be "live streamed" on 24 April at 15:45 (3:45 pm) UK time, under this LINK. Watch this space for post-conference musings in mid-May.