Methodologies

Live & Learn is committed to environmental and sustainable development education that is innovative, culturally relevant and grounded in local knowledge. To ensure that our projects meet these requirements we use two key methodologies: Rapid Assessments of Perceptions and Most Significant Change techniques .

In the beginning of Live & Learn projects, Rapid Assessments of Perceptions (RAPs) are conducted with our partner communities. RAPs combine community mapping, ranking, focus groups, and unstructured interviews to learn and document the perceptions of diverse community members. Live & Learn staff seek out community members, such as the elderly, women, and children, to participate so that disenfranchised community members are given opportunities to share freely their thoughts on various environmental issues.

While Live & Learn project officers conduct real time assessments throughout all our projects, the Most Significant Change technique is conducted with community members to identify the level of influence by a certain project.

The process involves the collection of significant change (SC) stories emanating from the field level, and the systematic selection of the most significant of these stories by panels of designated stakeholders or staff. The designated staff and stakeholders are initially involved by ‘searching' for project impact. Once changes have been captured, various people sit down together, read the stories aloud and have regular and often in-depth discussions about the value of these reported changes. When the technique is implemented successfully, whole teams of people begin to focus their attention on program impact.

1. It is a good means of identifying unexpected changes.

2. It is a good way to clearly identify the values that prevail in an organisation and to have a practical discussion about which of those values are the most important. This happens when people think through and discuss which of the SCs is the most significant. This can happen at all levels of the organisation.

3. It is a participatory form of monitoring that requires no special professional skills. Compared to other monitoring approaches, it is easy to communicate across cultures. There is no need to explain what an indicator is. Everyone can tell stories about events they think were important.

4. It encourages analysis as well as data collection because people have to explain why they believe one change is more important than another.

5. It can build staff capacity in analysing data and conceptualising impact.

6. It can deliver a rich picture of what is happening, rather than an overly simplified picture where organisational, social and economic developments are reduced to a single number.

7. It can be used to monitor and evaluate bottom-up initiatives that do not have predefined outcomes against which to evaluate.

MSC Technique information quoted from The ‘Most Significant Change' (MSC) Technique: A Guide to Its Use " by Rick Davies and Jess Dart (2005). 104 pages.