Recently in openGlobalRights, Emma Naughton and Kevin Kelpin wrote that human rights work does not easily lend itself to quantifiable, results-oriented evaluations. Their comments echo those of another expert who examined evaluation at Amnesty International and others in 2014, and also found that linear evaluations are ill-suited to their work.
Complexity at all levels is perhaps the greatest challenge. Human rights issues and problems are multi-faceted with numerous stakeholders, causes, potential solutions and outcomes. Human rights groups have multiple partners and coalitions, and are concerned with multiple types of victims. We work with these actors and more to influence the behavior of multiple stakeholders, policymakers and perpetrators. How we conduct our work is intricate, with many different types and methods of research, communications products designed for multiple audiences, and multiple advocacy strategies and targets.
Organizational culture, resources and prioritization concerns, along with the case-specific nature of much of our work, are among the other challenges to implementing standardized impact evaluation strategies at HRW.
