# Presentation: 027768

## Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002:Outcomes & Measures

**Cornelia Butler Flora**
**North Central Regional Center for Rural Development**
- _[cflora@iastate.edu](mailto:cflora@iastate.edu)_
- _[www.ncrcrd.iastate.edu](http://www.ncrcrd.iastate.edu/)_

## Purposes of the National Rural Development Partnershipcomposed of the Coordinating Committee and the State Rural Development Councils according to Sec. 6021, sec. 378, B 2, of the Farm Security and Rural Development Act of 2002

**Empower and build the capacity of States and rural communities**** ****to design flexible and innovative responses to their own special rural development needs****, ****with local determination of progress and selection of projects and activities**

## Duties of State Rural Development Councilsaccording to Sec. 6021, sec. 378, 6, subsection d, 3 of the Farm Security and Rural Development Act of 2002

**A****. ****Facilitate ****collaboration**** among Federal, State, local, and tribal governments and the private and nonprofit sectors ****in the planning and implementation  of programs and polities that have an impact on the rural area of the state**
**B. ****Monitor, report, and comment on policies and programs**** that ****address**** or fail to address, the ****needs of the rural areas of the State**
**C. As part of the Partnernship, in conjunction with the Coordinating Committee, facilitate the ****development of strategies to reduce or eliminate conflicting or duplicative administrative or regulatory requirements**** of Federal, State, local and tribal governments **
**D. **
**i.   Provide to the Coordinating Committee an annual plan with goals and performance measure and**
**ii.  Submit to the Coordinating Committee an annual report on the progress of the State rural development council in meeting goals and measures**

## SRDC Structures in Place 

- Key outcome:
- Improve Program & Policy Effectiveness

- SRDC Provides Strong Networking and
- Collaboration Opportunities

- SRDC Sets Short-Term and Long-Term Goals through Strategic Planning

- SRDC Structures in Place

## The NRDP Cycle

- Rural Investment Act

- Other stakeholders

- Assessment of
- Rural Needs and
- Identification of Polices and Programs in           Place to
- Address Them

- Goals and Objectives
- Through
- Strategic Plan

- Action through
- Partnership

- Measure of Progress

- Clear Presentation
- Of Accomplishments
- Related to Goals and
- Objectives

- Stakeholder
- satisfaction

- Stakeholder
- Resources

## Need for Demonstrable Results

**State and local needs**
**Base line data that indicate the conditions to be improved**
**Analysis of what are alternative ways to improve those conditions**
**Make clear what the causal chain is**
**Measure outputs and outcomes**
**Relate to activities and inputs**

## The Conundrum of Causality

**Time Order**
**Co variation**
**Elimination of Rival Causal Factors**

## The Morass of Systemic Change

**Systems are not linear**
**Everything is connected to everything else**
**Major changes can come from outside the system**
**Many small changes in policy, resource allocation, rules and regulations are needed for change within a system**

## Local conditions

- People with appropriate skills

- Affordable
- housing

- Childcare

- Transportation

- Health
- care

- Move a lot

- Must care
- for kids

- No car, car
- breaks down

- Illness
- Chronic
- conditions

- Economic
- development

- Education and
- training

- Access to
- healthy food

- Low energy
- Hunger

- Arrive regularly on time
- Get along with fellow workers
- Take instruction

- Mentoring

**Local conditions**

**People who want to work**

***Individual ***
***situations***

***Community***
***solutions***

## Monitoring and evaluation is only useful when the long term goal is clear.  We shift from monitoring activities and outputs to monitor progress toward multiple outcomes.  

## Process Framework for Identifying Indicators

**Inputs: Resources applied to meet process objectives**
**Activities: What we do (such as meetings, identifying key actors, design a web site, etc.)**
**Outputs:  Immediate direct results**
**Outcomes: Longer term results mediated through process outputs and other systems activities**

## Outcomes

**The larger goals of rural investment **
**The implementation of policies and projects that improve the standard of living and quality of life in rural America as determined by local people**
**What we expect to happen as a result of our activities**
**We cannot totally control it**
**The most important reasons we do what we do.**

## What you think is important to measure is based on your goals and objectives

**You need to be clear on where you are going collectively before you can measure your progress in getting there**
**Mental models of what causes what may mean lead to very different alternatives and strategies**
**Is is easier to focus on strategies and activities than make explicit our goals and our mental models**.

## Output

**The immediate product**
**A policy drafted**
**A project implemented**
**Income generated**
**Something we can control**
**Means to achieve the outcomes**

## Activities:What we do to achieve the outputs

**Meetings**
**Communications**
**Technical Assistance**
**Training**
**Project design and implementation**

## Inputs

**$$$**
**People/Time**
**Space**
**Technology**
**Communications technology**
**Organization**

## Measuring success

**What is happening?**
**Identify rural problems and their current indicators and a target change in the indicator**
**Analyze their causes**
**Enumerate existing attempts to resolve them**
**Identify explicit gaps to be filled**
**Do not confuse the absence of something with a problem**
**What did we do?**
**Identify policies that cause the gaps**
**Design a strategy to change those policies **
**Monitor to see if policy changes and what can be done to help it change**
**Identify resources to fill the gaps**
**See which entities, public and private, have political, cultural, human, social, natural or financial resources that can contribute to addressing the problem or issue**
**Mobilize those resources effectively **

## Accountability

**Planning**
**Progress**
**Performance *****Results***** Measurement**
**Potential (Appropriate Time Frame)**

## Accountability Includes

**Goals**
**Baseline measures**
**Annual performance results**

## Accountability facilitates

**Continuous improvement**
**Creation of learning communities**
**Building strong partnerships**

## To whom is your State Rural Development Council accountable?

## Accountability

**Adminstratively**
**Federal – ****critical:  State RD director is the first line of direct communication to OMB**
**State**
**Local**
**Legislatively**
**Congress**
**State **
**Local**
**Moral ownership**
**Rural peoples of the nation**
**Rural peoples of the state**
**Tribal and local governments**
**Private sector**
**Federal and state officials in the state**
**Non-profit organizations**

## Measures should

**Give us data we trust **
**Mean something to the various stakeholders**
**Give strategic signals**

## Measurement is Feared because of their experience

**Information can be used to take things away**
**“****They” will pick the wrong indicator or the wrong measure**
**There is so much we cannot control that it is a waste of time to measure outcomes**
**We don’t know who will use the data for what purpose**

## Barriers to Measuring outcomes

**We get excited about activities and strategies**
**We may have differences with our collaborators on the desired futures we seek**
**We may have very different mental causal models on how to reach our objectives.**
**We want to look good and so we measure what we do, not what happens when we do it.**
**Being busy does not necessarily mean being productive in terms of moving toward better futures.**

## Purpose of Indicators

**Show progress toward achieving identifiable goals**
**Enable key participants to improve the system from their own level**
**Support communication of effectiveness and performance**
**Indicators should NOT divert us from our work**

## Common Pitfalls in Selecting Indicators

**Unclear relationships between outcomes and process activities**
**Default to readily available information**
**Selecting unmeasurable as indicators**
**Irrelevant to goals and activities**
**Demanding to be comprehensive**

## More pitfalls

**Complexity and multi-dimensional outcomes can be an excuse for fuzzy thinking and not measuring**
**In the past, projects have gathered lots of data with little information: carefully pick what you are going to measure**

## Mapping Outcomes

**Who are the partners?**
**What are the shared goals/outcomes?**
**What are the inputs of each partner?**
**What are the activities/processes involved in bringing together the inputs?**
**What were the outputs?**
**What outcomes were achieved?**

## Efficiency Ratio

**The proportion of resources we leverage in achieving our outcomes**

## Criteria for Measures

**Likely to change because of what we do**
**Responsive to what we do **
**Resistant to “noise”**
**Easy to measure at different points in time**

## Negotiation of Evidence

**What is meaningful in terms of where the Council wants to go (understanding lack of consensus in any group)?**
**What is meaningful in terms of Congress and the Administration?**
**The role of the Council is to work on measures that are meaningful to a variety of stakeholders that show both short term successes and long-term progress toward goals.  **