ability indicators focus either on the science that goes into indicator development seeking to make them rational and relevant or on the soft impacts such as social capital, community empowerment or capacity building that are outcomes of their use. When attention is turned to what effect they have on policy, it is often difficult to discern any link between their use and policy change. This 2009 paper by Nancy Holman seeks to address this problem by consolidating current thinking on indicators and asking the question: How far have notions of governance been incorporated into current research into indicators? The answer to this question has implications for the continuing utility of indicators as policy tools, not only in so far as they are able to aid the evaluation of policy, but also, and arguably more importantly, in how they are able to facilitate relationships between actors and act a catalyst around which various contested meanings of sustainability can be evaluated.
- Monitoring and evaluation in conservation a review of trends and approaches This paper from Caroline Stem, Richard Margoluis, Nick Salafsky and Marcia Brown (2005) notes the growing recognition among conservation practitioners and scholars that good project management is integrally linked to well-designed monitoring and evaluation systems. They also observe that in practice the results are mixed, with practitioners failing to learn from each other. This paper reviews monitoring and evaluation approaches in conservation and other fields including international development, public health, family planning, education, social services, and business. The results are presented here for the field of conservation. They suggest that the conservation community continue support of collaborative initiatives to improve monitoring and evaluation, establish clear definitions of commonly used terms, clarify monitoring and evaluation system components, apply available approaches appropriately, and include qualitative and social variables in monitoring efforts.
- Good practice guidelines for the development and reporting of indicators To help ensure the integrity, quality and transparency of indicator reports, Statistics New Zealand (2009) has produced a set of good practice guidelines. The guidelines are a web-based product and provide practical advice on the factors that should be addressed in developing indicator reports and the characteristics of good practice. They also include case studies and links to relevant resources where further information can be obtained. The guidelines are structured into five sections which represent the five main stages in the development and reporting of indicators: i) Establishing the purpose of the indicators; ii) Designing the conceptual framework; iii) Selecting and designing the indicators; iv) Interpreting and reporting the indicators; and v) Maintaining and reviewing the indicators. This report summarises the characteristics of good practice associated with each of these stages in indicator development and reporting, and illustrates them with case studies of indicator initiatives in New Zealand and Australia.
You may also be interested in a related page in the knowledge management section with links on how best to develop conceptual models. Another related page in this section provides a number of links outlining how to develop programme-based outcomes models, also called intervention logic models.