How impact management shapes democracy

Impact management looks like a technical field. You choose indicators, collect data and write a report. But whoever measures is making choices. Which change counts? Who gets to say whether something worked? And who hears the result? Those are political questions too.

In this piece we look at what impact management does to democracy. It can make democracy stronger. It can also hollow it out, quietly. Often both happen at once, in the same council or the same programme.

The words first

By impact management we mean all the work around one question: what does your work change, and for whom? In development work this is often called MEAL: monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning. Sometimes a P is added, for planning or participation. In government you are more likely to hear policy evaluation and accountability.

By democracy we mean more than elections. It is also the conversation between residents and those who govern them, the scrutiny of power, and the room to disagree. Measuring plays a part in all of these.

Accountability is a democratic idea

If you spend other people’s money, you explain what happened to it. That idea is older than impact management. In the Netherlands the national audit office, the Algemene Rekenkamer, has checked how central government spends money since 1814. Parliament has the right to approve the budget. Without information on what a policy does, it cannot use that right well.

This is where evaluation helps. A good policy evaluation tells you whether a measure was effective and efficient. Did it work, and at what cost? A councillor can then ask questions about more than the budget. A minister has to explain why a programme carries on when it achieves little.

The same goes for a fund or a foundation. They also spend money on a public purpose, often with a tax advantage. An open report on what that money changes makes it possible to discuss it. What nobody measures or writes down, nobody can call into question.

Who gets a say

Accountability usually flows upwards: from the people doing the work to the funder, from the council to central government. The people the work is about tend to hear the result last. Sometimes they never hear it at all.

In 1969 the American researcher Sherry Arnstein described a ladder of citizen participation. At the bottom is non-participation. Above it come informing and consulting: you may speak, but nothing changes. At the top are partnership, delegated power and citizen control. The ladder fits evaluation too. As a resident, do you only fill in a questionnaire? Or do you help decide what is measured and what the result means?

Some methods take that question seriously. In participatory evaluation, participants help choose what counts. With Most Significant Change, people tell which change mattered most to them, and a group chooses together which stories go forward. That shifts a little power to the people the work is about. We prefer to call them rights-holders, because their rights are at stake.

A well-known example of democracy in the budget comes from Porto Alegre in Brazil. From 1989, residents there helped decide, district by district, on part of the city’s investment. Many cities followed. In the Netherlands, too, there are neighbourhood budgets that residents decide on themselves.

When the figure replaces politics

There is another side. A figure feels neutral, and so it can hide a political choice. In 1995 the historian Theodore Porter described how officials reach for numbers when they are under pressure. A number looks objective. It takes the decision out of the realm of judgement and debate.

That may look efficient, but it shifts power. Whoever chooses the indicator decides what the debate is about. Take a council that judges its debt advice service on the number of cases closed. Then speed counts. Whether people are truly back on their feet a year later does not. That choice is rarely debated in the council chamber. It sits hidden in a report.

The American researcher Donald Campbell warned about this as early as 1979Source: Donald T. Campbell, Evaluation and Program Planning 2(1), Checked. The more a figure is used for decisions, the more it comes under pressure. It starts to shape the behaviour it was meant to measure. For a democracy that is a risk. A service starts to steer by what the council sees, not by what residents need.

The Netherlands knows how this can turn out. In the childcare benefits scandal, tens of thousands of parents were wrongly treated as fraudsters. The approach centred on recovering money, with rigid rules and a risk model. In December 2020 a parliamentary committee wrote that basic principles of the rule of law had been violated. Its report was called Ongekend onrecht (Unprecedented injustice). A month later the government resigned. The scandal was not about impact management. It does show what can happen when an organisation steers by what it counts, and stops hearing people’s stories.

Who sets the yardstick

A law goes through parliament. A standard for impact usually does not. It is written by a foundation, a network of investors or a group of advisers. They often work in the open and invite responses in a consultation. But if you lack the time, the money or the English, it is harder to take part.

Funders have influence too. A large foundation that decides which results it wants to see steers the work of every organisation it supports. That can turn out well. It does mean that a public purpose is partly defined by parties nobody elected. An open conversation about the yardstick is therefore part of good governance, at a foundation as much as anywhere.

European law works differently. The European Parliament and the Council adopted the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)Source: Europees Parlement en Raad van de Europese Unie, Not yet checked. You may disagree with it strongly, but there is a democratic route to change it. That route was used in 2026: the Omnibus package narrowed the CSRD to fewer companiesSource: Europees Parlement en Raad van de Europese Unie, Not yet checked. For a private standard that route is less clear.

Measuring can widen the debate

Measuring is not only a risk. It can also widen the democratic debate. For a long time the discussion about progress turned on one figure: growth in gross domestic product. Since 2018 Statistics Netherlands (CBS) has published its Monitor of Well-being every year. It appears on Accountability Day, when the government accounts for the previous year.

That puts health, housing, nature and trust next to income. It also raises the question of who pays the bill, now or later, here or elsewhere. Municipalities and provinces also use broad prosperity as a basis for policy. Measuring then becomes a way to put more subjects on the table.

But here too, the choice of indicators is political. Does loneliness count? What about the distance to your GP? Or the quality of the air in your street? Whoever makes those choices decides what politics talks about.

Residents who measure for themselves

Sometimes residents measure for themselves. They put up sensors for particulate matter, count the traffic in their street or keep track of how often the bus is late. In Flanders in 2018, thousands of households took part in a large study of air quality called CurieuzeNeuzen. Its results then played a part in the debate on traffic and health.

Measurements like these turn things round. It is not the authorities measuring residents, but residents measuring the authorities. A community group with its own data is in a stronger position when it talks to the council. If you can count, you can answer back.

What this asks of you

Impact management does not make democracy better or worse by itself. It depends on how you do it. A few questions help.

Who chooses the indicators? Discuss the yardstick openly, in the council, on the board or with the people the work is about. An indicator is a choice, not a fact.

Who hears the result? Accountability also runs sideways and downwards. Show residents and participants what happens to their answers.

What is left out of view? Write down what you do not measure, and why. Then someone else can ask whether that is right.

Is there room for an awkward result? An evaluation that only confirms does not help the debate. Room for doubt and dissent belongs in it.

Who may judge? A figure can inform a decision. It must not replace people’s judgement. In a democracy people decide, for reasons they can explain.

The question remains

Measuring is power. Whoever measures shows one thing and keeps another out of view. In a democracy that power should be open to scrutiny, like any other power. That does not call for a new framework. It calls for asking, at every measurement: who decides what counts, and who gets a say in that?