Compare methods

	Most Significant Change for Development	Results-Based Management
Field	Development Studies	Development Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	2002
Originator	Rick Davies & Jess Dart	OECD-DAC; United Nations Development Group; aid-effectiveness agenda (Paris Declaration / Accra)
Type	Participatory, story-based monitoring and evaluation technique	Management and evaluation strategy for development results
Seminal source	Davies, R., & Dart, J. (2005). The 'Most Significant Change' (MSC) Technique: A Guide to Its Use. CARE International, Oxfam, et al.	OECD-DAC (2002). Glossary of Key Terms in Evaluation and Results Based Management. OECD Development Assistance Committee, Paris.
Aliases	MSC technique, Story-based monitoring, Most significant change stories, Monitoring without indicators	RBM, Managing for Development Results, Managing for Results, Results Framework Approach
Related	4	4
Summary	The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique is a participatory, story-based approach to monitoring and evaluating development programmes that dispenses with predefined indicators. Developed by Rick Davies and elaborated with Jess Dart in their widely used 2005 guide, it works by systematically collecting stories of significant change from those closest to a programme and then filtering and selecting the most significant of them through deliberative panels at successive levels of the organisational hierarchy. The result is a structured, dialogical account of what stakeholders themselves judge to be the most important outcomes of an intervention.	Results-Based Management (RBM) is a management strategy that orients all the activities, resources, and processes of an organisation or programme toward achieving and demonstrating clearly defined results, rather than merely tracking inputs delivered and activities completed. Codified in the OECD-DAC's 2002 evaluation glossary and adopted across the United Nations, the World Bank, and bilateral agencies, it embeds a results chain, performance indicators, and continuous monitoring into the full project cycle so that evidence on outcomes feeds back into decisions.