Healthlink Worldwide

The Pelican Initiative

How do we learn about what we are doing while having the biggest possible impact on the social change processes that we use?

This is the central question posed by the Pelican Initiative, a network set up in December 2002 by a group of like-minded researchers, communicators, donor agencies and evaluators after attending a two-day workshop in The Netherlands. “We wanted to find a way to share up-to-the-minute thinking about how to get more out of evaluation and evidence-based communication”, says Andrew Chetley of Healthlink Worldwide, one of the Pelican Initiative’s founding contributors.

Linking communication and evaluation
Organisations tend to learn from combinations of research, participatory inquiry and monitoring and evaluation (M&E). But to be of benefit to all stakeholders, effective communication also has to be included. Linking communication and evaluation processes makes learning more accessible to people at all levels of involvement, sharing that learning with a wider audience.

Join in
The Pelican Initiative, open to anyone, is interested in the issues of learning and development. It seeks to bring together development practitioners from different disciplines, specialists and policy makers to share experiences, and to push the agenda further on three themes:

Theme 1. Evidence and learning for policy change

• How are lessons learned used in development policy and programming (among donors and national governments)?
• What role is played by evidence (for example gathered through monitoring and evaluation, participatory inquiry, academic research)?
• When does evidence contribute to policy change; what is the role of M&E in producing such evidence?
• How are partnerships formed between donors and beneficiaries in producing evidence?

Theme 2. Learning in organisations and among partners

• What communications mechanisms (internal and external) support learning from evidence?
• How does collective as well as individual learning occur in organisations?
• What is the role of evidence (from M&E or otherwise) in organisational change processes?
• How can learning from evidence be strengthened in organisations by the management?
• How can learning in organisations be enhanced through communication?
• What characterises organisations that learn timely and opportunely?

Theme 3. Society-wide learning among a multitude of stakeholders

• How can multi-stakeholder participatory processes contribute to change in society, beyond those directly involved in the process?
• What role is or should be played by evidence (for example gathered through M&E, participatory inquiry, research)?
• What is the potential for social mobilisation around evidence by involving a larger number of actors in its interpretation and communication?
• What is the role of evidence brought forward by different types of stakeholders?

All are welcome to join the Pelican Initiative; partners in the South are particularly invited to contribute stories and reflections on the issues at hand. The initiative has limited funds to support Southern organisations in documenting their stories if needed.

The online space (http://www.dgroups.org/groups/pelican/index.cfm) has over 250 members where issues are discussed by its participants.  In the later half of 2006 discussions included the ownership of learning, new approaches to evaluation, different types of learning, participatory video and the evaluation of community radio.

The space is also used to share case-studies examining communication and learning at an organisation level, learning for policy-makers, as well as society-wide learning.

Methods and toolkits are listed, which provide guidance on all aspects of learning, evaluation and communication, such as mapping techniques, frameworks, measuring change, collecting life-stories and ways to learn from practice. Events in the field of learning and communication are listed to share information about upcoming conferences and workshops.

2007 update
The Pelican Initiative is pleased to announce its first publication called Networking for Learning: The human face of knowledge management? Written by Niels Keijzer, Charlotte Ornemark and Paul Engel, it is available in English and French (the French version is expected to become available by March 2007). The Pelican publications are designed to summarise and complement electronically shared materials, and to foster debate on aspects of evidence-based communication and learning.

The publication focuses on the learning function of networking between different stakeholders. It discusses what we know about what works, what does not work, and what could work when it comes to networking for learning.

For more information, or to join the group and discus the ideas further go to: http://www.dgroups.org/groups/pelican/index.cfm