Does an SL approach have anything to offer besides evaluating a programme or project?
In addition to project or programme design, the SL approach has been used in country-based scoping missions – a precursor to focusing down on specific programmes or projects. Ideally, several areas of information would already be available on which the SL approach could draw: these would include macro- economic and sectoral overviews; they might also include: reviews of the performance of democratically decentralised bodies (e.g. in local government) and of public sector service delivery: reviews of relations among different ethnic or social groups, and participatory poverty assessments. Recent suggestions have also been made concerning the potential for the SL framework to include elements of political analysis. The argument here is that in many countries the allocation of resources for development, the performance of the public administration and the functioning of democratic bodies, whether participatory (for instance, resource user-groups) or representative (for instance, local gov
