Monitoring and Evaluating Outcomes of Community Involvement - The LITMUS experience

Community involvement is now one of the top priorities in the policy agenda of local governments. Many leading political and academic institutions have been advocating more transparency and inclusion in decision-making processes since new Labour took over (Blair, 1998; Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1998; Giddens, 1998; Local Government Management Board, 1998). Across the UK local authorities are trying to implement the new agenda and are increasingly allocating resources for involving communities in areas such as urban regeneration programmes, community development and social inclusion programmes and other local decision-making processes. What has been achieved by these efforts so far? This question touches on the scope of evaluation. Evaluation can be seen as a systematic way of re ecting and analysing inputs, outputs and outcomes of a project or programme (Charities Evaluation Services, 1998). In the context of community involvement, evaluation seeks to answer the following questions. Evaluating inputs: how much money has been spent on community involvement? Evaluating outputs: which community involvement activities have been carried out? Was it good practice or bad practice? Evaluating outcomes: what has been the impact of the community involvement activities? How far have the aims been met? In addition, evaluation is capable of explaining results and making recommendations for improvements. Why has this impact happened? What can we learn from this? Relatively little literature and few case-studies concerned with monitoring and evaluating outcomes of community involvement can be found. Current practices focus on monitoring and evaluating inputs and outputs. These perspectives fail to highlight and analyse how far aims, in terms of achieved outcomes of community involvement, have been met. Furthermore, they are incapable of analysing why certain outcomes have been achieved or not. This paper seeks to show how outcomes of community involvement can be evaluated, by illustrating a case-study. The Ž rst part discusses different approaches to involving stakeholders in the monitoring and evaluation process. The second part highlights experiences and results of the LITMUS evaluation. This evaluation has been focusing on assessing and analysing outcomes of 27 community involvement activities in the context of a project which developed local indicators of sustainable development (see Box 1)