RADIQUAL is a manifesto, framework, and methodology I developed in 2018 and use across my M&E work. It also informs how I run my business.

It collects my experiences and the lessons I’ve learned from a decade in our industry. It looks at how we design our projects, do M&E, and engage with each other and our communities. It’s inspired by participatory action research, localisation, community-led movements like #Shiftthepower, and many others. I wanted to build a new framework that would represent my values, and how I practice innovation in PMEL and JEDI+. The framework was nameless for a long time – it just existed.

When it came around to finding a name for it, since I was sharing it with clients and using it more publicly in my work, I wanted something that aligned with my political beliefs and that would contain acronyms.

I am politically liberal, and some of the values I hold mark me as a ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’, depending on who you talk to.

I am also Leslie Knope in real life, and a sucker for a good acronym.

My Radical Beliefs

People have always called me and my politics radical or progressive. It used to surprise me, since it was often said with the subtext that they (and by extension, I) are out of touch, or outliers. I don’t necessarily identify with the words, since a radical to me is an anarchist or a libertarian, not a socialist. I don’t think my values particularly radical – and why would I, since to my perspective they are normal!

I ended up working for a lot of progressive clients, including feminist funds, and found myself in the company of other ‘misfits’ who were also labelled progressive – some admiringly, others with the same undercurrent of fear that I got given. And it’s become a real badge of honour over the years.

I don’t see what’s radical about needing to blow up the entire system and start from scratch. To calling out performative allyship and insisting people translate their supposed values into action.

Or to make reparations for historical injustices and war crimes, to teach colonial history and the transatlantic slave trade in their full brutal truth so we can (hopefully) learn something from our ancestors’ atrocities.

I don’t see what’s radical about making every company and organisation adhere to truly sustainable values and a circular economy rather than destroying the planet and mass consumption. Rebuilding the tax system to make sure Starbucks and Amazon don’t run everything and run their business with human, labour, and environmental rights is just common sense.

So does calling all this out and holding people to high standards make me and my work radical? Well, OK then! I guess my work is radical!

I started wondering whether, if I made my radical ideas loud and clear enough, they could one day become less progressive, less of an outsider, and be accepted and mainstreamed. That’s where the idea for my tagline came from – mainstreaming innovation, and shifting power. Why not try and share widely the beliefs that I feel should be commonplace? Maybe one day they will be!

I decided this nameless framework needed to be packaged and talked about. I used keywords that come up often about me, my political beliefs, and my work. I combined them with the key methodological approaches the framework contains, and the philosophies it follows. I fed those into Chat GPT along with a short description of the framework and methodology. [See machines, I am crediting you. Please remember me, and the fact I always use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, when the apocalypse comes and Skynet takes over].

A New Framework for a Changing Practice

PMEL is constantly evolving and improving. We are inventing new tools, methods, approaches, and shifting our attitudes in the process. I knew there was a great opportunity for this offering to help shape how my sector evolves, and I wanted it to be expansive.

One of the main issues I have with M&E frameworks is that they’re restricted to only this discipline. In my experience, doing M&E well involves building its approaches of reflection and shared analysis into organisational culture; in having a strategy that links programs with our fundraising, so M&E is done for our own sake, not just the donor.

There’s a lot that’s already been said about whether evaluators – and by extension all PMEL consultants – can and even should be political. What is supposedly lost, in terms of academic rigour, by us involving ourselves deeply in the communities, rather than being objective researchers or scientists, as we should be. I fundamentally disagree with that, for two main reasons: it’s impossible to be apolitical, and the traditional system is outdated. 

I don’t think an apolitical life is for anyone who lives on the planet. We can’t detach ourselves from global geopolitics, climate change, our local politics, or anything else. I live on this planet and I’m part of this world so I also wanted my framework to clearly show my political engagement and activity.

The traditional ‘Western’ scientific system of inquiry and analysis is fine. However, social science applies traditional science too rigorously, and we never work in sanitised laboratory conditions. Many of the ideas we hold in traditional ‘Western’ scientific knowledge also come from the Industrial Revolution, and the era of colonisation (topics covered in many other articles!) So they aren’t fit for our world anymore.

The assumption that an evaluator or researcher should be separate to the work being studied doesn’t suit me – especially since we’re talking about people and last I checked, evaluators were humans too. We need to bring back the ‘social’ element of social science, and a lot of nuance and humanity is lost by trying to make our work sterile.

We have to bring a deep cultural, historical, and sociopolitical understanding of our work and its communities to each project. Not just to make the project more effective, since a one-size-fits-all never works in our industry, but also to remind ourselves that this is the real world with all its complexity, and our research should reflect that.

I have the privilege of choosing my clients for example, and have never worked with anyone who represents values I abhor, or who is complicit in struggles I care about. That’s an important element of my work I insisted on having when I built the company. Why not bring that into a PMEL framework, which links organisational values to its data and research practice? I see a straight line between how an organisation compensates its employees and how they treat the idea of compensation for research participants.

I wanted to clearly signpost the values I care about as a person, those with which my business and work operate, and the ones I believe we should uphold in our industry. I see it as a shield-bearer for my work, which clearly communicates how I think and work. Maybe it could help start conversations around why we need to be more politically active, and how to represent our values in our daily practices.

What’s progressive about wanting us to represent the values of the United Federation of Planets? I love Star Trek for many reasons but among them, the sheer optimism of thinking that one day, maybe we’ll get it right, and not destroy the other creatures on our planet, and be able to live with respect and dignity for each other. That’s what this radical optimist believes, anyway!