A ten-years-after impact analysis of a Companion Modelling approach. Final evaluation report
Résumé
The approach: 1. Companion Modeling (ComMod) is a participatory approach used over the 15 years all over the world in order to help a diversity of stakeholders progress to reach an agreement about how to collectively deal with a given issue (multiple uses of natural resources, conflict resolution, value chain organization, land uses planning, policy participatory design, participatory monitoring and evaluation...). The approach achieves lasting impacts for empowerment at both local and national levels thanks to a twofold specificity: methodological and strategic. 2. The methodology focuses on a specific capacity building objective: to let the targeted groups learn by doing right from the first step, through an autonomous and collective practice of designing solutions to a common issue, then assessing and improving these solutions. The role of the support team is limited to monitoring only. The aim is to establish a dynamic autonomous learning-by-doing process which will continue after the light external intervention and make incremental empowerment impacts from local to national levels. 3. The approach also strongly focuses on defining an initial institutional strategy to impact the whole institutional context, from local to national levels. The strategy is defined around the identification of the needed first and smallest change of the local context for a first but lasting impact on empowerment, and, from there, the prior relationships and capacity building that need to be established to set in motion the essential first socio institutional step previously identified. 4. As a result, ComMod approach consists in a light support of (i) the prior design of an empowerment strategy, and (ii) three 2 days participatory workshops (for about 25 people, from the local aimed group) dispatched on 2 years. 5. The empowerment strategy is collectively designed by a local strategic alliance rallied at the beginning of the project. Then participatory workshops used specific role playing games in which participants themselves design the game, and then test their own ideas on how to collectively deal with the issue. These simulation games enable participants to explore future scenarios, by 'playing' their ideas and assessing the consequences in the game/model. As the roles of the different players preserve the diversity of stakeholders, potential impacts are assessed for each stakeholder's group, in peculiar distinguishing disadvantaged groups. 6. Lasting empowerment impacts on local autonomy are expected after the intervention, and both at local and national levels, thanks to the autonomous learning-by-doing process: (i) local autonomous improvement of the initial participatory decisions and (ii) progressive autonomous advocacy to embed local issues into national policies. 7. The approach is mastered by an increasing international community of practice (www.commod.org), which provides reference people, guidelines, training materials and trainings. The evaluation: 8. Between April and July 2012, IFAD has supported the evaluation of the oldest ComMod experiment ("Opération Poas" 1999-2000, Senegal River Valley, Senegal). The objective of this past intervention was to empower rural district councils so that they would be able to autonomously (i) design then manage a local land uses planning, (ii) oppose higher powers (specially centralized State agencies) to defend local interests and points of view; (iii) embed their local needs in national policy frameworks. The chosen site for the experiment was the largest and most complex rural district of Senegal: the Ross Bethio Communauté Rurale, that covers the whole Delta of Senegal River. 9. Evaluation showed sustainable local impacts, whether in the short term (e.g. after three 2-days-workshops, the district council has designed and implemented its own planning to deal with the key issues it has chosen; this also represented a step for the district council to learn about more inclusiveness in its decision-making), or in the medium term (e.g. after the end of the support, the district council found alone the means to develop infrastructure, to organize internally to manage the issue, and even to efficiently defend local needs from top-down programs and behaviors), or in the long term (e.g. 12 years after, some local councils still use their 'Poas' plan to oppose to land grabbing). 10. Evaluation also showed national impacts, whether in the short term (e.g. 2 years after the end of the support, a council of ministers council stipulated that the method should taken up in the whole country), or in the medium term (e.g. each regional plan takes into account the local land uses needs identified during the Poas experiment), and in the long term (e.g. 12 years after, the methodology designed by the local council during the ComMod experiment is acknowledged throughout country, but also in some bordering countries, to set district land uses planning). 11. These different impacts have been reached through an autonomous progressive diffusion, from the initial (1998-2000) well-thought capacity- and relationships--building and institutional strategic facilitation.
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