Most Significant Change for Development

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.