RE: Evaluating agroecology: what is your experience? | Eval Forward

Dear colleagues and readers, thank you for your audience and active participation in the discussion. It makes me really glad that more people know about TAPE now, and can exchange practices.

Several of you suggested mapping the TAPE criteria against existing evaluation frameworks, notably the DAC criteria. I also thought about this when writing the blog post. For instance, aligning the TAPE criteria on productivity to the standard evaluation criteria on effectiveness and impact; the TAPE criteria on income, added value and resilience to evaluation criteria of economic sustainability, and so on. However, in consultation with colleagues and prior to the blog’s publication, we thought a good first step would be to present the TAPE without this mapping, to avoid confusion (also because the placement of some of the criteria is really open to debate). 

Some of the comments which are really technical on TAPE have been forwarded to the TAPE tool developers and managers at FAO. In the meantime, thank you Olivier Cossée and Laurent Barbut, among others, for your comments about the definition of the concept itself, as well as the consequent challenges. Despite the limitations, one powerful aspect of integrating an assessment and monitoring tool like the TAPE, is that “it offers an alternative to the mainstream evaluations approaches” (to quote Anna Maria Augustin’s comment).

Some concrete (and valuable!) examples of avenues for TAPE’s use from the discussion were:

  • Utilizing the proposed indicators for facilitation in rural communities. Anna Maria Augustyn says that when she worked with project beneficiaries on developing indicators in participatory manner she felt that a good background template with indicators was missing. TAPE could be a good resource for this.
  • The TAPE guidelines provide sample questionnaires in an annex, which could be adapted locally and used by evaluators (and others) to build their own tool or questionnaire.

Thank you, Elias Kuntashula, for sharing that you had a positive experience already applying the TAPE questionnaires in Zambia. And Malika Bounfour, how wonderful to know that contributed to a project evaluation where women empowerment, youth employment and traditional knowledge were all added to the assessment areas. It is interesting to also hear about monitoring agroecology practice in DRC (thanks Anne Scarpitta and Jean Marie Ruhanamirindi for sharing).

Finally, we welcome that colleagues, for example, Paul Mendy and Kewe Kane, are open to testing out the specific indicators proposed by the TAPE. Please let us know how it goes!