Marlene is a Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) expert with a PhD in Social Psychology. She is specialised in research, project management, and PM&E in the development and agri-food sector, especially in Southern and Eastern Africa. She lived and worked for over 15 years in South Africa, where she co-founded the South African Evaluation Association. Currently, she is affiliated to two South African social enterprises, Social Dimensions and Future Focused Leadership, and works at Wageningen University and Research in The Netherlands.
Marlene aims to support responsible and well-informed food system transformation and is passionate about co-creating actionable knowledge. Currently, she is developing an approach for designing and using theories of change or transformation that use behavioural insights in collaboration and collective action. Another key interest is engaging youth in local development through involvement in action research, a kind of citizen science. Wherever possible, she tries to contribute to PM&E capacity development and critical thinking through participatory approaches.
Netherlands
Marlene ROEFS
senior advisor
Wageningen Social and Economic Research
Posted on 11/05/2025
Dear colleagues, thank you for starting and contributing to this rich conversation evaluation of SSTC interventions. In addition to the relevance of using behavioural insights (see the COM B model for instance - https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/organizational-behavior/the-com-b-model-for-behavior-change), addressing power dynamics, legitimacy concerns, and other key contextual dimensions, it might be useful to actively take on board the evaluation uses and criteria of the key partners involved. This was one of the insights we gained in a recent study on multistakeholder collaboration for the EU DeSIRA programme, which supported research and innovation in agriculture in Africa, Asia and Latin America - https://www.desiraliftcommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/0704-DeSIRA-LIFT-Learning-brief3-1.pdf ). Understanding when different actors regard collaboration or cooperation as successful, and the similarities or dissimilarities in their views may be valuable information in itself.
Going one step further, evaluating multistakeholder collaboration and other complex interventions may benefit from 'experience-based' evaluation. This is a rather unconventional approach we are reflecting upon in the International Support Group (https://isginternational.org/ ) . It entails engaging decision-makers (at different levels) in the actual evaluation process; putting on the evaluator hat and actively formulating evaluation questions, developing methods and tools, gathering and analyzing data, sensemaking, and communicating findings. In this evaluation process, or parts thereof, they mix cognition with the 5 human senses and experience the evaluand and process. We wonder if having this in-depth experience of complex evaluation may benefit the users of evaluation in their and their partners' uses. I am very keen to hear what fellow evaluators think of this, and perhaps some have experience in this that they could share.