Postdoctoral researcher on the decolonial turn in development Monitoring and Evaluation.

While our research group analyses development processes, actors and policies in general, development monitoring and evaluation is one of the crucial aspects hereof and our group has also developed a critical mass of expertise on this topic. To date, however, there is a large gap between the literature in this field and the recent literature on the decolonial turn in development studies. The post-doc challenge can be a welcome opportunity to explore how the literature on decolonization of development questions both thinking and practice in development monitoring and evaluation. To be sure, there are some existing streams of literature that may help in closing the gap between both literatures: This work may involve, among other things, (1) building further on power analyses of participatory or community based evaluation methods (Cooke & Kothari 2001; Cohen et al 2021), (2) engaging with 'indigenous knowledge systems' (Shepherd & Graham 2020) and transformative forms of evaluation (Mertens 2009), (3) adapting evaluation processes to cultural contexts through 'culturally responsive approaches' (Chouinard & Cram 2020), (4) explicitly dealing with the ecological sustainability aspects of development interventions (Patton 2020) and (5) pursuing "aidnography" to analyze the political economy context in which many monitoring and evaluation activities take place, also taking into account the importance of donor involvement in processes of monitoring and evaluation (Lewis & Mosse 2006; Eyben et al 2015; Olivier de Sardan 2021).

Keywords:APPLIED DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS

Disciplines:Economic development policy