Back to our roots: Principles of uncertainty as applied to monitoring and evaluation for gender and climate change work

In deconstructing the notion of human beings as living ‘outside’ nature, Glazebrook tells the following story: “Humans are animals, and embodiment entails natural processes. At a recent conference, a speaker who urged the audience to ‘get back to nature’ was quickly challenged: when had he left? He had been seen eating breakfast.” Climate change is a big reminder of this reality. Thinking of ourselves as outside nature allowed us to not take notice of where our waste went, or to see how limited the ability of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases was, and global warming is important in reminding us that in fact we never left. Unfortunately, it takes time for our dominant knowledge systems to catch up with that reality. The assumption that we can abstract from nature sufficiently to pursue a neat and tidy experimental method still underlies much development work. However, with climate change, we are increasingly being forced to accept that such an approach is not useful. Instead we are better off conceding the principle of uncertainty: not only can we not know everything we need to know, we also will never be sure quite how much we do not know. Throughout this essay, I will be using food supply as a practical example, since it is not only a deeply gendered process, but also a timely reminder of the fact that we never left nature behind. This essay looks at how to apply the principle of uncertainty to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of gender and climate change work. It is necessary to pay analytical attention to this problem, since M&E of climate change adaptation is widely agreed to be different from previous development work. It has been observed that best way to approach the issue is to negotiate principles of M&E in the initial stage of project planning. However, so far it has not been possible to do this for the simple reason that the first few projects did not know what to expect. Now, however, we are in a better position to begin to develop a gender-specific methodology for climate change adaptation. This will come in handy for people planning future projects.