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	Most Significant Change	Empowerment Evaluation
Field	Public Policy	Public Policy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	1994
Originator	Rick Davies & Jess Dart	David Fetterman
Type	Participatory, story-based monitoring and evaluation technique	Participatory, capacity-building evaluation approach
Seminal source	Davies, R., & Dart, J. (2005). The 'Most Significant Change' (MSC) Technique: A Guide to Its Use.	Fetterman, D. M. (1994). Empowerment evaluation. Evaluation Practice, 15(1), 1–15.
Aliases	MSC, MSC Technique, Story-Based Monitoring, Davies-Dart Most Significant Change	Fetterman Empowerment Evaluation, Self-Determination Evaluation
Related	4	4
Summary	The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique is a participatory, story-based approach to monitoring and evaluation developed by Rick Davies and refined with Jess Dart. It involves the systematic collection of stories of significant change from the field and the deliberative selection of the most significant of these by panels of stakeholders. There are no predefined indicators; instead, value judgements about what change matters most are made transparently by those involved, making MSC especially suited to capturing unexpected and qualitative outcomes in complex programs.	Empowerment evaluation is a participatory approach in which an evaluator acts as a coach and critical friend, helping program staff and community members evaluate their own work so as to foster improvement and self-determination. Introduced by David Fetterman in his 1994 presidential address to the American Evaluation Association, it deliberately shifts control of the evaluation to the people running the program. The goal is not only to assess merit and worth but to build the group's internal capacity for evaluative thinking and to embed evaluation as a routine, owned part of organisational life.