Who measures, who judges, who learns?
One person often holds every role in monitoring, evaluation, accountability, learning and participation. Role purity and role integrity help you see where that clashes, and what to do about it.
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MEALP stands for monitoring, evaluation, accountability, learning and participation. In many organisations it sits with one department, one consultancy or even one person. That person collects the figures and judges them. The same person writes the report for the funder and leads the learning conversation with the team. It is efficient. But each role asks for something different, and sometimes for the opposite.
Five roles, five questions
Monitoring asks: what is happening, as precisely as we can tell? Evaluation asks: what is it worth, against which yardstick? Accountability asks: did we do what we promised, and who do we answer to? Learning asks: what will we do differently tomorrow? Participation asks: who has a say, and who helps decide?
Those questions do not always fit together. For accountability you want a figure that is right and that you can defend. To learn, you want the figure that disappoints, and room for doubt. If you do both at once, you feel that tension in every meeting.
Two ideas help
Role purity is about structure. Is it clear to the whole team who holds which role? And are roles kept apart where they clash? A consultancy that designs a theory of change and later judges its outcomes has a problem with role purity. Even when the work is good.
Role integrity is about conduct. Do you stay true to your role when that is uncomfortable? An evaluator who softens a conclusion to please the board loses role integrity. So does someone who leads a learning conversation and then passes judgement.
One without the other does not work. You can keep roles neatly apart on paper and still bend under pressure. And in a small charity you may hold every role at once. Then you need to say honestly, each time, which role you are playing.
Where it often goes wrong
The client is also the subject. A foundation pays for an evaluation of its own programme. The evaluator would like another assignment. Nobody asks for a nicer story, but both sides know which story is welcome.
Learning becomes accountability. A team shares a setback in a learning session. A month later it turns up in the report to the funder, without explanation. Next time nobody shares anything.
Participation becomes window dressing. Participants fill in a questionnaire and get to tell their story. But they never hear what happened to their input, and they decide nothing. Then they are a source of data, not a partner.
The adviser judges their own work. If you helped design a programme, you mostly see what works. That is human. So a second look is not a luxury.
What we do ourselves
First, for every assignment we write down who holds which role. Who measures, who judges, who decides, who is accountable, and to whom? It fits on one page, and the client signs it too.
Second, we keep roles apart where the stakes are highest. If we helped design a programme, we do not judge its outcome alone. We ask for a second opinion or bring in another consultancy.
Third, we make visible what we cannot keep apart. In a small team you then say out loud which role you have right now. ‘I’m the evaluator now, not the coach.’ It sounds formal, but it gives the whole team something to hold on to.
Fourth, we agree in advance what happens to a setback. What a team shares in a learning session does not go into the report until we have talked it through. That keeps learning safe and accountability honest.
Fifth, we tell participants and other rights-holders which role they have. Do they give information, have a say, or help decide? And we show them what happened to their input.
A first step
Take the last report you wrote. Next to each part, note which role you played there. If there is more than one, you know where to start the conversation.
