by Gereltsetseg Adiya, Oyuntulkhuur Jukov, Itgemjit Gankhuyag and Azjargal Amarsanaa
With the enforcement of Mongolia’s Law on Special Protected Area (*), 97% of Tsagaannuur soum in Khuvsgul province where the Tsaatan live has been declared a strictly protected zone. This has placed major restrictions on their traditional way of life: hunting, seasonal migration, reindeer herding, and pasture use have all become increasingly limited. These restrictions directly affect their food security, cultural traditions, and quality of life.
Recognizing that the Tsaatan voices have been systematically excluded from designing, implementing and evaluating policies, this participatory and culturally responsive evaluation demonstrates how meaningful participation can transform the evaluation of conservation policies – by centering Tsaatan people’s traditional knowledge and ensuring their perspectives directly shape evaluations and are considered in policy making, that affect their ancestral lands.
Over the past two decades, the movement aimed at achieving evidence-based policies has gained importance and prominence. It holds that policymakers should base their decisions on the best available evidence regarding “what works,” rather than on ideologies or in response to particular interests.
When I wrote 
DEVICES FOR COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH, ITINERANT COLLECTIVE MAPPING, CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHIES AND PEDAGOGICAL RESOURCES FOR COMMUNITY USE
Outcome Harvesting is a participatory method used to identify, formulate, analyze, and learn from the changes brought about by an intervention, especially when cause-effect relationships are complex or unknown.
At a crucial moment for Uruguay (my country) and the region, reflection on the role of participatory evaluation takes on particular relevance. Despite their limitations, evaluation tools offer a unique opportunity to address current challenges in an effective and sustainable manner. On the one hand, these tools can contribute to reducing polarization, foster collaboration and promote more inclusive solutions; on the other hand, they require significant resources and face the risk of bias in their implementation.
Storytelling is a universal feature of human culture that is used to communicate, educate and entertain. The simplicity of storytelling ensures that the audience participates and understands the messages the storyteller intends to convey. But storytelling is not simple; it is an art that has evolved and transformed throughout human existence.
In the past, people with disabilities have been left out of many aspects of life including research and evaluation. They have not usually been included in ‘mainstream’ studies about key topics such as health, education, WASH, gender empowerment, social and political participation, while other groups in populations are more routinely asked for their views and their qualitative data is collected.
The idea for the document shared in this post was first discussed during a conference on monitoring in Germany. Our objective was to identify literature on broadly applicable quality standards or criteria for monitoring that could be considered nearly universal in their validity and application. While such documents exist for evaluation and research, no comparable paper could be found for monitoring.