Chapter 5: Constituent Voice: Feedback Loops, Relationships and Continual Improvement in Complex System Change

Working in relationships of mutuality is a necessary precondition for success in any collaborative and systematic effort to improve peoples' lives. Keystone Accountability has been working for a decade to develop simple, low cost and actionable measures of performance based on the experience and perceptions of key constituents – and ways of using these data in generative dialogue to deepen insights, strengthen relationships, foster ownership and agency and improve the outcomes of development interventions. They call this method and its accompanying toolbox Constituent Voice.

This chapter briefly explores Keystone's journey of discovery and what they have learnt about using feedback loops (metrics plus dialogue) to better understand and strengthen relationships, performance and emergent impacts in development assistance.