Number 4, Summer 1996

CCCRTE

by Andy Carl, Conciliation Resources

• We were asked to address ourselves to the following "dilemmas", broadly grouped under the heading of "stakeholders":
• Who do we carry out evaluations for? Donors? Ourselves as trainers or conflict resolution practitioners? For the participants?
• How does the evaluation process accommodate the organisational or social "culture"?
• Whose views count? Who should we involve in the evaluation process?
• How can we use the stakeholders "know-how" to formulate criteria for evaluation?
• What are the dilemmas of the donors with regard to evaluation?
• Why do we evaluate?
• How can we improve conflict resolution training with regard to accountability and participation?

In the course of the discussion a number of additional questions were asked. Once we have assessed who are the "stakeholders" in a conflict resolution training, we might ask ourselves what "rights" do they have as stakeholders. It is one thing to identify who is affected by such an initiative, it is another to ask who has the power to learn from the experience or to make some change as a result of it? We then went on to define who are the generic stakeholders in a training. We began by drawing something of a pyramid (see below) And then we agreed that beyond the participants was the wider constituency of those people affected by the conflict; and with the exception of some trusts, beyond most grant-making agencies is their support constituency of tax-payers or individuals donors. This is of course an over-simplification, and there were earlier discussions about the complex nature of the relationship of the participants in a seminar and their relation to the other protagonists to the conflict.

People Affected by Conflicts
Participants
Trainers
Host Institution(s)
Donors
Tax-payers or individual donation-makers

What we found useful about mapping the wider picture was to consider the importance of communication and advocacy for the middle actors in the diagram -- that is, to what degree have any of these elements communicated with their constituency or are they effective and even aware of their role as advocates between the two poles?

• How can you reconcile the competing interests of these stakeholders?
• How can you redress the power equation and give rights (and responsibilities) to those stakeholders who might otherwise be passive or powerless?
• How can you strengthen mutual accountabilities between the stakeholders: trainers to their trainees? participants to their constituents? agencies to their donors? donors to their constituencies? And what of the non-linear relationships represented by the hour-glass figure above: participants to the donors and donors to the wider constituency of people affected by the conflict?

We discussed a few examples of attempts to strengthening accountability, mostly drawn from development experiences, including employing "independent" auditors and more formative (rather than summative) forms of evaluation using "client-based monitoring systems", such as the "participatory rural appraisal" model.

A working definition of a formative assessment was one where we are more interested in what we have learned from the training experience than we are in whether the initiative met its original goals, and where we adjust or change as we go along, as soon as possible applying the insights gained from monitoring. We wondered whether it was possible to find resources for a more expansive, formative monitoring, when training itself is already under-resourced. We also recognised that sometimes evaluative experiences do not do justice to the intention. Finally, we suggested to the group at large that the CCCRTE consider pooling examples of approaches to or models of evaluation and monitoring.

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