Complex M&E Systems: Raising standards, lowering the bar

This paper is largely based on my personal experience of designing, supporting and maintaining complex M&E systems for a variety of civil society organisations (CSOs) over the past twenty years. It also draws heavily on conversations and discussions with M&E practitioners from many different organisations. Some sections of this paper have appeared in different forms in previous papers, articles and blogs, although this paper goes further than previous publications in drawing together my thinking.
The purposes of the paper are as follows:
• to understand and explain how M&E systems operate in organisations and complex programmes;
• to provide a theoretical framework for understanding them in the hope that others will further develop this framework over time;
• to better understand how information and analyses can be summarised across large portfolios of work; and
• to introduce some ideas on how to use complex M&E systems to contribute to management decision-making at programme- or organisational-level.