How to Learn from a Development Project?

—The Use of Ethnography for Drawing Lessons—

Abstract

This article concerns how to draw lessons from the evaluation of development projects. The first part examines why a good lesson is difficult to gain. The first problem relates to the perspective of logframe. The scope of evaluation based on a logframe tends to be narrow, focusing mainly on the logic of the narrative summary in the logframe with little interest in social dynamics outside of the project. Consequently neither the outside influences on the project nor the impacts of the project on the society attract due attention. Such a narrow focus only produces superficial lessons. The second problem concerns the practice of lesson drawing in actual evaluation procedure. Japan International Cooperation Agency's manual for project evaluation, for example, is conscious of the first problem, but vague about how to solve it. A not so helpful manual could be a cause for unsound evaluation.

The second part of the article suggests that the use of ethnography is effective for improving the quality of lessons. Ethnography is a method for describing a culture in detail, criticizing the assumption of cultural homogeneity and continuity. Moreover, it recognizes the limitation of description as a partial truth and hence warns against a naive belief in the objectivity of cultural analysis. Applying an ethnographic evaluation to PAPROSOC, a rural development project done by Japanese government in Mexico, the article examines a lesson written in the official evaluation report. The introduction of the life improvement approach, popular during the postwar period in rural Japan, was effective for PAPROSOC's target group as the lesson states, but with limited success. The reason is the difference of social dynamics between postwar Japan and contemporary Mexico. Thus, a real lesson should be that we pay more attention to the social dynamics in which target group lives so that we can elaborate the life improvement approach both theoretically and practically.