Monitoring & Evaluation
 By measuring the effects of their projects along the way, partners can evaluate progress toward their shared goals.
Partnerships and communities of all types are using indicators to monitor progress toward their goals, evaluate effectiveness of their approaches, and demonstrate successes. This page provides resources to help groups understand and develop monitoring and evaluation approaches using environmental, economic, social, and/or organizational indicators.
For members of collaborative groups with differing interests, the process of developing and using indicators promotes mutual learning. This process, often called “multiparty monitoring,” can help partners understand each others’ perspectives, clarify common goals, and collect trusted information for making decisions.
Guides and Handbooks
Broadening Participation in Biological Monitoring: Guidelines for Scientists and Managers. This how-to manual from the Institute for Culture and Ecology provides hands-on resources for developing, implementing, and evaluating a participatory monitoring plan for a partnership or project.
Check Your Success: A Guide to Developing Indicators for Community Based Environmental Projects is designed for organizations and groups of all sizes that are working on environmental protection at a community level.
Communicating Successes of Public-Private Partnerships [PDF, 40 pages]: A Primer on How to Develop Metrics for Sharing Your White Water to Blue Water Partnership Successes provides examples relevant to any public-private partnership. January 2005.
Two multiparty monitoring guides from the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program provide comprehensive guidance for community and partnership projects in Southwestern Ponderosa pine forests. The guides, available as PDFs, are called:
- The Multiparty Monitoring Handbook Series
- Multiparty Monitoring and Assessment Guidelines for Community Based Forest Restoration in Southwestern Ponderosa Pine Forests
Measuring Community Success and Sustainability: An Interactive Workbook helps communities learn how to measure the local or regional impacts of economic and community development processes that enhance rural community sustainability.
Measuring Progress: An Evaluation Guide for Ecosystem and Community-Based Projects is one of many resources provided by the Ecosystem Management Initiative to evaluate social, ecological, and process aspects of partnerships.
Articles
This annotated bibliography of scholarly articles on indicator frameworks is provided by Australia’s Coastal Cooperative Research Centre.
Indicators for Sustainable Communities: A Strategy Building on Complexity Theory and Distributed Intelligence [PDF, 28 pages]. Judith Innes and David E. Booher. September 1999.
Of, By and For…Realizing the Catalytic Potential of Community-Centered Indicators [PDF, 16 pages]. Tyler Norris, Chris Paterson and Terri Bailey. Green Mountain Institute for Environmental Democracy. November 2003.
Organizations and Additional Resources
The Community Indicators Consortium is a learning network to help communities develop and implement community indicators.
The Community Indicators Project, part of Redefining Progress, links existing and emerging projects and facilitates the development of community indicators initiatives nationwide through a series of tools, resources, and technical support.
Sustainable Measures develops indicators that measure progress toward a sustainable economy, society, and environment. The company works with communities, companies, regional organizations, and government agencies.
The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership is a collaborative effort by the Urban Institute and local partners to further the use of neighborhood-level information systems in local policymaking and ommunity building. |
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