In the quest for accountability, techniques such as Results Based Management,(RBM) which tend to focus on “outputs”, “activities” and quantifiable “results”, are often not useful to human rights organizations. Regardless of their specific issue area, human rights groups work towards fundamental social change. Results based management evaluations are unnecessarily cumbersome, too focused on linear causality and unaware of incremental but critical changes for complex human rights advocacy. In their rush for measurable results, human rights organizations risk forgetting the central role of people in social change.
Processes other than RBM exist. Learning-Based Management and Outcome Mapping, for example, help human rights workers engage in evaluative thinking every day, not only at donor-prescribed periods. They show human rights groups how to realistically assess who they can actually impact in their work, and then teach them to focus their efforts on changing the attitudes and behaviors of specific officials, activists, corporations and other stakeholders. These processes emphasize measuring small changes along the way.
Consider a hypothetical human rights campaign to protect the rights of migrant workers. Donors, working with a results-based management perspective, would ask human rights workers to collect data on numbers of migrant workers with new capacities to advocate for their rights; new fair labor policies and practices adopted by corporations; and new government initiatives to enforce labor protections. Moreover, donors would want evidence that all these quantifiable results were generated by the human rights work they had paid for.
