Caitlin Blaser MapitsaUniversity of the Witwatersrand | wits · School of Governance
Caitlin Blaser Mapitsa
Phd
About
47
Publications
8,801
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103
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I'm currently looking at systems of local governance of natural resources in Southern Africa, including cultural views of natural heritage. My background is in understanding drivers of change in institutions and the politics of evidence use, and I like participant coded narratives, and participatory action research.
Publications
Publications (47)
African parliaments are a unique institutional context for evidence use, and processes for digitalisation have specific implications for how evidence systems can contribute to democracy. While African parliaments have organisational features that make introducing technology challenging, they also hold significant promise for using digitalisation as...
Botswana’s new national climate-adaptation plan framework acknowledges the fundamental challenges climate change is posing to household resilience. While the plan aims to be gender-responsive, there is limited empirical data on the current gender dynamics around household-level climate-adaptive priorities and practices. This study aims to understan...
The objective of this systematic review (SR) is to identify, assess and synthesize evidence on the effectiveness of feedback, reminders, salience (communication), salience (experience design), and goal-setting interventions conducted in developing countries on environmental/climate and development outcomes. We conducted 12 meta-analyses. The most e...
Background: Acknowledging the need to transform the evaluation sector in Africa, locally generated approaches have been a recent area of contestation for both researchers and practitioners. Whilst the need for an African evaluation approach has been well established in the literature, there are still significant gaps in a proactive response. One of...
The primary objective of this protocol for a systematic review is to identify, assess and synthesize evidence on the effectiveness of feedback, reminders, salience and goal setting interventions conducted in developing countries on environmental and development outcomes. It facilitates the use of evidence in informing policy and practice within the...
This evidence gap map (EGM) presents a landscape of studies on the effectiveness of behavioural science interventions in non-Annex I settings, a group of mainly developing countries within the context of the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The EGM summarizes causal evidence from development and environme...
Inland fisheries play a critical role in the ecology of the Okavango Delta, but their conservation is particularly complex. For nearly a decade, communities, conservancies, policy makers, and partner organisations have worked to establish fish reserves across the Kavango and Zambezi. Guidelines on the establishment of fish reserves have been develo...
The role parliaments play in governance is fundamentally political, and as a result, the institutional side of parliamentary organisations is often overlooked. This volume, together with the theoretical volume African Parliaments: Evidence systems for governance and development, takes a practical look at African parliaments as institutions, and exp...
The role parliaments play in governance is fundamentally political and, as a result, the institutional side of parliamentary organisations is often overlooked. This volume, together with the theoretical volume African Parliaments: Evidence systems for governance and development, takes a practical look at African parliaments as institutions, and exp...
The role parliaments play in governance is fundamentally political and, as a result, the institutional side of parliamentary organisations is often overlooked. This volume, together with the theoretical volume African Parliaments: Evidence systems for governance and development, takes a practical look at African parliaments as institutions, and exp...
This review aims to examine which interventions are effective in promoting environmental and development outcomes from individuals, households, communities and companies, and how effective efforts have been to date. The specific focus of the review is driven by the growing hope that behavioural interventions such as consumption feedback, social com...
Parliaments play a pivotal role in governance, and yet little is known about how evidence is used for decision-making in these complex, political environments. Together with its practice companion volume, African Parliaments: Systems of evidence in practice, this volume explores the multiple roles legislatures play in governance, the varied mandate...
Parliaments play a pivotal role in governance, and yet little is known about how evidence is used for decision-making in these complex, political environments. Together with its practice companion volume, African Parliaments: Systems of evidence in practice, this volume explores the multiple roles legislatures play in governance, the varied mandate...
Parliaments play a pivotal role in governance, and yet little is known about how evidence is used for decision-making in these complex, political environments. Together with its practice companion volume, African Parliaments: Systems of evidence in practice, this volume explores the multiple roles legislatures play in governance, the varied mandate...
Indigenous Research Methodologies has formed an important part of the curriculum in four courses on evaluation and research methodologies taught over the last 3 years, particularly a massive open online course on decolonising evaluation. Each student cohort, from a global group of 400 evaluation professionals, to a group of 35 South African civil s...
The evaluation sector has been struggling with systems that claim to be monitoring and evaluation, but in fact stop with the monitoring. However, equally problematic, yet much less discussed, is the phenomenon of evaluation without monitoring. This article considers three different contexts that may require evaluators to evaluate a programme with l...
Background
African countries are developing their monitoring and evaluation policies to systematise, structure and institutionalise evaluations and use of evaluative evidence across the government sector. The pace at which evaluations are institutionalised and systematised across African governments is progressing relatively slowly.
Aims and objec...
Strengthening countries' performance on the SDGs increases their resilience to future shocks. This can be better achieved through the entrenchment of evaluation systems in organisational practice for the systematic conduct of SDG evaluations. Governments are ultimately responsible for progress towards achieving the SDGs over the next 9 years. There...
Background: The need to demonstrate development results has prompted governments
across Africa to build systems to generate, supply and use evaluative evidence for
policy-informed decision-making, budgeting and programming. National evaluation systems
(NESs) are being set up across Africa, together with the processes and other monitoring and
evalua...
We build a database of peer reviewed journal articles in the evaluation sector from a range of African countries, over 10 years. We also included evaluation reports from key databases, but could not be extensive due to constraints in resources and time. We then analysed the database data in a variety of ways, to shed light on current evaluation deb...
Aim: This article seeks to understand the enablers and constraints to the effective use of data for planning in South African municipalities, by looking at an understudied empirical nexus between migration and the managerial systems of planning.
Settings: Planning is an increasingly critical municipal function, with mobility and shifting
settlemen...
Monitoring and Evaluation discourse in Africa has evolved to focus on building systems at a national level. While this systemic approach has many advantages, its implementation often runs up against the uncomfortable reality that governments have complex incentives to use evidence, and this evidence can equally contribute to decision making that is...
A recent study interrogating the ways in which municipal authorities in South Africa
are governing their mobile communities demonstrated that there is potential for both
conceptual innovation and methodological rigor when integrating the cross-cutting
systems of migration and local governance. However, this integration also posed a
number of challe...
The challenges posed by climate change highlight something South African workers have known for decades: that planning on the basis of geography is inherently limited. Multi-locality is an increasingly recognised strategy South African households use to strengthen resilience and mitigate risks. Spreading different components of households geographi...
As global discussions of evaluation standards become more contextually nuanced, culturally responsive conceptions of ethics have not been sufficiently discussed. In academic social research, ethical clearance processes have been designed to protect vulnerable people from harm related to participation in a research project. This article expands the...
Background: Theory of Change for Development is a free online course developed at an African institution to strengthen evaluation capacity in the region. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide a platform for building skills at scale in the region. Scholars of evaluation have long pointed to a gap between supply and demand that frustrates both...
Purpose:
This article explores the implications of outsourcing the evaluation function in South Africa, a context where there is a mismatch between evaluation supply and demand. It unpacks the tradeoffs between internal and external evaluation, and challenges some commonly held assumptions about both.
Approach:
Based on experiences as an interna...
Integrated development planning processes are key mechanisms for engaging communities in local decision making, and legitimising the work of municipal governments. However, civil servants have held a longstanding series of assumptions about populations being fixed, of migration as a phenomenon that should be controlled, and of communities that are...
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the role of migrants in the process of place making, through case studies of migrant engagement with municipal planning in five South African municipalities.
Design/methodology/approach
This study draws on empirical research carried out over two years, using mixed methods research in each municipal case study. Da...
Mobility and urbanization are shaping cities in Southern Africa. Peri-urban areas in particular are transforming at such a pace that municipalities are struggling to keep up with the changes. Local government is trying to build appropriate capacity to respond to a mobile population, but it is not always clear where to focus capacity development eff...
There is a disjuncture between the way social cohesion is understood, and the way government programming has been designed to promote it. As public sector monitoring and evaluation systems expand, and social cohesion has been recognised as a pillar of South Africa’s National Development Plan, building consensus on how to measure the most salient co...
Background: Since 2015, the Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results-Anglophone Africa (CLEAR-AA) has implemented more than seven diagnostic tools to better understand monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems in the region. Through the process of adapting global tools to make them more appropriate to an African context, CLEAR-AA has learned sev...
National Evaluation Systems (NESs) articulate the way that national governments measure progress on inequality. Meeting SDG 10 is central to a country’s socioeconomic development. This study will explore the way SDG 10 is measured by varying countries, to help better understand the mechanisms governments have in place to tackle inequality. The Sust...
Background: This article emphasizes the importance of reflecting on the methods employed when designing diagnostic tools for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems. It sheds light on a broader debate about how we understand and assess M&E systems within their political and organisational contexts.
Objectives: The article looks at what divergent pu...
Background: This article reflects on the implementation of a diagnostic study carried out to understand the gender responsiveness of the national monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems of Benin, South Africa and Uganda. Carrying out the study found that the potential for integrating the cross-cutting systems of gender and monitoring and evaluation...
Drawing on research from five peri-urban sites across South Africa on how local government is responding to mobility, this research explores how xenophobia is being produced by local governance processes and structures. Building a better understanding of the mechanisms of exclusion in local government is essential not only for planning intervention...
Questions
Questions (2)
I currently do qualitative work around defining buffer zones and boundaries, and am thinking about how I can integrate GIS into future research. I'd like to see some examples of this done well!
Hello! I'm interested in building or joining existing research collaborations, but the channel our research office directs us to (researchconnect) seems better suited for hard sciences. Are there similar platforms or outlets for social sciences?
Projects
Projects (4)
Parliaments play a critical role in development, accountability, and democracy across Africa, but there is a dearth of evidence around their structure and function. Furthermore, with a push to strengthen evidence based decision making across governments, understanding the role of evidence within Parliaments as they legislate, represent constituents, and hold the executive to account, is a fundamental piece of information about the current function of the African state.
The book will be aimed at practitioners and academics in the African governance space. It will include a mix of empirical information about the structure and function of parliaments, analysis around evidence use, and case studies from parliamentary practices. It emerges from a longstanding peer learning process, so comparative approaches and analysis will feature throughout.
