Author biography

Jennifer Chapman is an international consultant with over twenty years experience in research, supporting and designing learning processes and participatory monitoring and evaluation. She has focused particularly on rights-based approaches to development, the challenges and issues of north-south partnerships and on advocacy, policy and campaigning work with an emphasis on ensuring community and people’s voices get heard in the policy process and in campaigning work. She has published widely in both academic journals and books and for practitioners including a jointly authored book The Aid Chain: Coercion and Commitment in Development NGOs 2006 from ITDG Publishing and Critical Webs of Power and Change: A resource pack for planning, reflection and learning in people-centred advocacy, co-author and co-editor with Antonella Mancini, ActionAid, Nov 2005.

Antonella Mancini is an evaluation practitioner with an international reputation. She has fifteen years of experience of international participatory development work at grassroots, policy development and management levels. Her area of expertise is in designing and facilitating participatory approaches for research, planning, monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment, with a particular interest in deepening and supporting stakeholder learning processes. Antonella has written numerous articles and papers on ActionAid’s Accountability Learning and Planning system and helped pioneer the Critical Stories of Change approach in ActionAid which explores change in a more holistic manner than standard evaluations.

Jennifer Chapman and Antonella Mancini have worked jointly with a broad range of organisations to develop and introduce participatory evaluation and learning methodologies which support critical reflection and multi stakeholder input, including developing the Critical Stories of Change approach with other organisations. They first started working with The Water Dialogues in June 2006 to develop a process to document and record its multi stakeholder collaborative approach. They were then asked to work on a Story of the Dialogues to capture some of the dynamics of the process at international level.