Using Cultural Model Analysis to Promote Diverse Voices in Formative Evaluation: How methodology can facilitate dialogue between development practitioner and beneficiary groups

Abstract Information: Methodologies for formative evaluations can be powerful tools for facilitating dialogue among diverse practitioner and beneficiary groups. Within the formative evaluation toolkit, tools for systems thinking can illuminate how development implementers and diverse groups among beneficiaries think about the world and their places within it. Cultural Model Analysis (CMA) is one such approach that can open a space for dialogue while revealing the often hidden or unarticulated assumptions diverse groups hold about how the world works and their relationships to it, each other, and the development initiative. This is a vital practice for evaluators working in cross-cultural or international settings and especially for those working in sectors with high degrees of complexity and/or uncertainty such as climate change. To ground CMA's theory and methods, this demonstration follows a case study of a formative evaluation of a USAID water management project in Burkina Faso, aimed to build communities’ resilience to climate change. Through the case study, the audience will understand the theory behind CMA, that human beings carry relatively tacit and unexamined views of the world that we hold implicitly true and that motivate our behaviors. The audience will become familiar with CMA’s qualitative data collection and analytical practices, including open-ended, semi-structured interview design and proposition analysis to identify linkages between implicitly true beliefs. The case study reveals how USAID practitioners and some Burkinabé youth hold one model of climate change and water management, while rural Burkinabé men and women of various religious and educational backgrounds, as well as some youth, hold another model. These two models, fundamentally at odds with one the other, reveal why beneficiaries were reluctant to adopt USAID’s water management initiatives in the ways they were intended and why, in their communication, practitioners and beneficiaries talked past one another. The demonstration concludes with lessons learned for using CMA findings to facilitate dialogue between development practitioners and beneficiary groups and recommendations for adapting CMA to diverse evaluation contexts.