- Convenors:
-
Annalena Oppel
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Jite Phido (Results for Development)
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- Format:
- Experimental format
- Stream:
- Creativity, participation and collaborative co-production in methods and practices
Short Abstract
This panel uses creative methodologies to interrogate what development's success metrics render invisible: slow transformation, relational knowledge, and generative failure. Cultural workers and arts-based researchers reveal alternative ways of knowing and valuing change that resists measurement.
Description
Development knowledge production remains structured by Western meritocratic logics that privilege rapid results, quantifiable outcomes, and scalable interventions. This panel interrogates what becomes invisible under these metrics: slow transformation, relational knowing, affective shifts, and the generative potential of failure and refusal.
Drawing on creative methodologies including visual ethnography, fiction, performance, and collaborative arts practice, this experimental panel invites cultural workers and arts-based researchers to present knowledge that resists conventional measures of success. When development projects 'fail' by standard indicators, what do they reveal about whose futures matter and which forms of change count? When transformation occurs across generations rather than project cycles, or circulates through story and image rather than policy briefs, how might we recognize and value it?
The panel wants to bring together scholars and practitioners whose work operates at the intersection of creative practice and development critique. Contributors are invited to explore photography that captures what reports cannot, fiction that reveals ideological structures in development encounters, performance as both methodology and outcome, and collaborative projects that prioritise relationship over deliverables. These approaches challenge not only who produces development knowledge, but the temporal, epistemological, and political assumptions embedded in how success itself is imagined. In an uncertain world demanding new ways of knowing, this panel seeks to find answers about: What futures become possible when we attend to what does not count? What do we learn from dwelling in ambiguity, honouring slow knowledge, and when valuing unmeasurable transformation?
Accepted contributions
Contribution short abstract
My presentation interrogates why dominant development metrics fail African youth-led organizations. Using TEDx-style storytelling and "counter-metrics" from Nigeria, Kenya, and Malawi, I deconstruct traditional logframes to center relational agency, power shifts, and the human cost of social impact.
Contribution long abstract
For too long, the story of development in Africa has been told through the rigid language of results-based management, burn rates, and pre-defined performance indicators. While these frameworks satisfy the accountability and compliance requirements of funders, they often fail to capture the visceral reality of systemic social change. This creative presentation interrogates the disconnect between project success and the actual survival and agency of youth-led organizations across Nigeria, Kenya, and Malawi.
Moving beyond quantitative outputs, I examine the affective and intangible elements ignored by standard Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) systems. I contrast traditional Western metrics with necessary local counter-metrics grounded in the realities of African rightsholders, shifting the focus from number of participants to growth in relational agency, and from policy briefs to measurable shifts in power. I also highlight the human cost of administrative compliance, specifically the psychological toll on young African leaders forced to fit radical visions into narrow logframes.
To mirror the participatory and relational evaluation I advocate for, this session adopts a TEDx-style narrative format. Rejecting "death by PowerPoint," the delivery uses storytelling as data, integrating visuals and audio clips from frontline actors to reveal human stories beneath social impact success stories and center the voices of youth leaders. This immersive experience challenges the development sector to redesign indicators for change that respect local expertise and account for the true cost of transformation.
Contribution short abstract
To speak of development is already to enter a conversation structured by Northern institutions, their metrics, their temporalities. Vernacular terms do not simply translate development into local contexts. They refuse its underlying assumptions about progress, individualism, and accumulation.
Contribution long abstract
To speak of development is already to enter a conversation structured by Northern institutions, their metrics, their temporalities. Vernacular terms do not simply translate development into local contexts. They refuse its underlying assumptions about progress, individualism, and accumulation. This contribution draws on the "Becoming Otherwise" project, which examines how individuals across the UK, Brazil, and South Africa reimagine success beyond conventional achievement narratives. Through digital storytelling with over 100 participants, the research reveals three distinct approaches to rethinking success: Celebrators who embrace alternative metrics of worth, Translators who negotiate between competing value systems, and Refusers who reject achievement frameworks entirely. These archetypes expose how deeply meritocratic narratives constrain not just individual aspiration but collective imagination about what counts as progress.
In the Global South contexts of this research, vernacular framings of success prove particularly revealing. They demonstrate how development discourse, even when critiqued, continues to structure the terms through which people articulate their desires, frustrations, and possibilities. Yet they also show moments where participants reach for language that escapes these frames entirely, gesturing toward forms of collective flourishing that resist Northern metrics of achievement. The contribution explores ideas of development and its alternatives through the linguistic and conceptual infrastructures that reside in creative visions about the future.
Contribution short abstract
This paper interrogates how dominant M&E frameworks obscure systems change, relational value, and learning. Drawing on systems innovation practice and decolonising funding debates, it proposes counter-metrics and creative approaches to evidencing transformation beyond linear impact.
Contribution long abstract
Despite growing recognition that development challenges are systemic, most monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks remain rooted in linear causality, attribution my, and short-term outcomes. This paper argues that such approaches systematically render invisible the kinds of systems transformation that matters most to local actors: shifts in relationships, power, norms, learning, and collective capacity.
Drawing on the Systems Innovation Explorations framework co-developed with IDIA and Results for Development, and the upcoming book, Reclaiming Africa’s Development Narrative, the paper uses Nigerian proverbs to examine how conventional M&E practices struggle to capture emergent change, productive failure, and non-linear pathways of influence. It foregrounds learning-oriented, adaptive, and values-based approaches to evidence that privilege sensemaking over control and contribution over attribution. These insights are placed in dialogue with arguments from decolonising development funding, which highlight how dominant metrics reproduce power asymmetries by privileging funder-defined success, technocratic evidence, and extractive knowledge practices.
Through reflective analysis of systems innovation programmes and funding practices, the paper proposes a set of counter-metric orientations that might better align evaluation with how systems actually change in a way more meaningful to those within it. It also explores the role of cultural and creative methodologies as legitimate forms of evidence that might hospice out the current hierarchical paradigm to surface meaning, dignity, and agency often excluded from traditional measurement tools.
This paper contributes to ongoing debates on evidence, accountability, and power in development, and offers practical provocations for funders, evaluators, and practitioners seeking to support transformation without erasing complexity.
Contribution short abstract
Focusing on photography in development advocacy, this paper asks how images can reveal forms of change that escape metrics and policy logics, while interrogating the ethical tensions of representation, affect, and the risk of turning suffering into spectacle.
Contribution long abstract
Photography has become a central tool in development and advocacy work, widely used by NGOs, independent media, and social movements to educate publics, mobilise attention, and generate urgency around social and environmental injustices. In Indonesia, visual storytelling is frequently deployed to convey harms that policy briefs and technical reports struggle to communicate, particularly in contexts of environmental destruction and structural violence. This contribution reflects on how photography enables affective and relational forms of knowing that exceed dominant development metrics, shaping how harm, responsibility, and care are felt rather than merely understood.
At the same time, the paper interrogates the ethical risks embedded in visual advocacy. The affective power of images can slide into the aestheticisation of suffering, emotional manipulation, and extractive circulation, especially when urgency overrides consent, context, and accountability. Images that succeed in moving audiences may simultaneously reproduce spectacle, flatten complex histories, or reduce communities to symbols of crisis. These tensions raise critical questions about what kinds of visual practices are considered successful within development frameworks, and what forms of impact remain invisible or uncounted.
Drawing on examples from advocacy photography and documentary practices, this contribution explores how photography operates within a double bind: as a tool capable of fostering ethical attention and solidarity, yet also one that risks reproducing harm through its circulation. The paper asks what it would mean to value visual practices that prioritise relationship, dignity, and ethical restraint over measurable outcomes.