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Collective monitoring
To empower and decide
Long term
Bottom-up
Active participation
Groupless
About

Collective monitoring is an ongoing participatory evaluation methodology that engages diverse stakeholders to assess the performance, equity, ecological, and gender impacts of urban initiatives, services, and policies over time. This methodology aims to transform the paradigm from vertical audits to community-based monitoring that integrates lived experiences, local knowledge, and institutional accountability. 

This approach ensures that actors with the capacity to decide and manage resources are accountable to historically marginalised groups, making collective monitoring a process of mutual learning and governance transformation.

Benefits

  • This approach not only strengthens transparency and institutional trust but also amplifies the voices of historically excluded groups such as women, carers, and marginalised communities. From a feminist and environmentalist perspective, this is critical to ensuring that policies respond to diverse and territorial needs

  • Establishing real-time monitoring mechanisms provides tools to adjust strategies, redress structural inequalities and improve public service delivery. This responsiveness is key in contexts of high climate uncertainty and social inequality.

  • Integrating official data with community knowledge and lived experiences allows for more nuanced assessments of policies’s effects on different social groups.

Importance

  • It makes marginalised knowledge and work visible

This transparency allows the environmental work carried out by women, community organisations and grassroots networks to be recognised and given visibility. Thus, it begins to change a common logic in which large international organisations receive most of the recognition, leaving the valuable contribution of those who act directly in the territories in the background.

  • Demand equity in power structures

Comparing the amount of funding actors in the territory receive from different institutions helps feminist and environmental networks demand that equity commitments be met. This comparison makes it clear who really supports local and intersectional initiatives and who only talks about equality without backing it up with resources or real change in power structures.

  • It co-responsibilises all actors involved in urban public policy

Instead of divided and competitive control, collective monitoring follows feminist principles of mutual care, collaboration and joint vision. This leaves behind the logic of top-down control and builds relationships based on trust, shared responsibility and real commitment to change.

Steps

  1. Define monitoring objectives and indicators aligned with the needs identified by the community.

  2. Map stakeholders and clarify roles in collection, analysis, validation and response.

  3. Create recurring forums or working groups where communities jointly review data and agree on proposals for action

  4. Analyse and synthesise findings and incorporate a feminist and environmental perspective as a method of interpretation

  5. Share results publicly through accessible reports and visual tools.

  6. Institutionalise monitoring cycles into formal governance processes.

Key Aspects

  • Design continuous, flexible and inclusive monitoring systems.

Monitoring should be carried out regularly, with the flexibility to respond to critical or seasonal moments. These systems should be connected to existing governance bodies and include spaces for exchange such as public hearings or policy feedback loops.

  • Strengthen co-responsibility through co-governance mechanisms.

Faced with the risks of tokenistic participation, it is essential to create monitoring structures that include multiple actors with real capacity to influence. Establishing monitoring boards with shared power and clear decision-making processes allows for progress towards horizontal accountability, aligned with feminist principles of collaboration, care and territorial justice.

  • Incorporate intersectional indicators and adaptive protocols.

For monitoring to be effective and transformative, indicators that reflect the realities of women and other historically invisible communities must be used. It is essential to include community verification mechanisms to contrast official data with experiences from the territory, as well as to train both community leaders and local authorities in feminist evaluation methodologies and eco-social impact analysis.

Outcomes

  • Co-created performance frameworks grounded in justice, care and sustainability.

  • Institutional changes in the way governments and partners inform, reflect and act.

  • Increased transparency, with community members actively influencing the allocation and evaluation of resources.

  • Longitudinal learning systems that grow over time and adapt to emerging needs.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This website reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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